Richard Russell
THE ESSENTIALS OF THE COMPOSITION PROCESS- A FEW NOTES FROM THE ROCK-FACE
#2 Mechanics of the Soul; Apparatus of the Sonic Landscape
I was lucky: I had parents who were interested in a wide variety of music, but more importantly they had a belief in creating a cultural environment for their kids. When I was about eight years old I played the recorder. In fact I was the only boy in the school's recorder group, and, since the feminist enlightenment hadn't quite reached Dalston Junction, I was required to play all the larger recorders, umpah-ing away on 'Frere Jacques' for all I was worth. Trendy at the time were two chaps who seemed to be doing much the same thing: the flautist James Galway and the panpipes player Gheorghe Zamfir. Galway, a truly fine flautist who paid the rent with dreadful MOR dirges, made me realise you could make it blowing down tubes, even if it sounded pretty crap; while trying to play along to Zamfir became my first introduction to the subtleties of note-bending and double-tonguing, tone-shading and grace-notes. At the time I couldn't read music: I used to write the letters underneath and memorise them. Only gradually did I start to realise the spidery dots and dashes made eminent sense on their own. Once I took up the clarinet, and began playing with pianos and other instruments, I found sight-reading wasn't just simple, it was particularly impressive, especially if you got it right first time. Fortunately for me, the music room at school had lots of orchestral scores lying around, spread like margarine among the glockenspiels and broken zithers, giving me my window on the reality of all that music i'd heard all my life. I memorised the Eine Kleine, bits of Aida, parts of a Beethoven string quartet. I got my first sight of the 'contemporary' music of the time like Xennakis and Maxwell Davies. At the same time I was becoming aware of a rift that existed in the music world, between the orchestral readers and the jazz improvisers, and through that the limitations of manuscript form.
I read and I practiced; I practiced and I read. Key modulation, sonata form, equal temperament, transposition. No more complicated than physics. No less logical than mathematics. My O-Level class of three became an A-Level class of three covering the whole of Islington. By which time I was already writing and performing on a regular basis. I think that early on I realised that far from being the terribly difficult art some performers would have you think, performing music was in fact rather a lot easier than the rest of daily life, which at the time consisted of school, a riotous zoo where survival of the bulliest was the primal force. To this day I find playing music to an audience far easier than the queue in the post office or the sense of impending terror on a nightbus or the potential ego-destruction of talking to a beautiful woman. As for writing music: it's great just to play, the chance to decide what everyone else plays is like deciding what everyone else will wear, drink, or talk about. The power of a single mind controlling the very emotional fabric of a room filled with people; more orate than a sermon; more colourful than any speech. To a composer, hearing a work performed for the first time is like that first flash of love on a summer afternoon, right down to the fluttering in the guts and the stutter.
Thesedays I use score-writing software and the great god midi plays me anything I write. This might not seem much, but when you weren't given the natural gifts of a Haydn or a Mozart, it is a huge advantage over scribbling away in the hope it sounds right. I don't use piano keyboards, recording, or real-time input. I just use a Pentium 1 and a mouse, step-time, inputting one note at a time, adjusting and amending until it sounds right. It is like knitting; or more accurately embroidery, as the total picture emerges slowly from a basic frame. I work on one thing at a time, usually in a linear fashion, not moving on until the last bit is right, or at least usable. The software has its limitations: size, instrument choice, the inability to handle several rapid changes of metre a la Stravinsky; but then i'd always suspected the Rite of Spring could be re-written in 2/4. In a sense I like the limitations: if you had an infinite universe to travel, where would you start?
Sometime around a century ago, concert music began to turn its back on tonality (that is music based on melody and a set key structure) and experiments began on other systems of organisation. Soon there were several alternative systems, or even choices involving no system at all. I don't write serialist music (that is music with all the tunes carefully taken out) but I do engage with it in the course of my work. I use tonal freedom within my own aesthetic, trying not to lose sight of the fact that the most important thing about any music is the noise it makes. And you can't simply write as though 500 years of tonal structures never happened; or as if Radio 3 only played Birtwistle and John Cage, either. In this, my early phase of work, I have deliberately considered the models of the past; by way of a grounding in tradition I feel is lacking. The drastic departures of Webern and Schoenberg created a schism which is ignored rather than healed. The word 'contemporary' composer is waved like the old red flag in front of the motor car, telling what follows is barely music at all. While the highest paid composers in the world, those on the Hollywood film roster, write one catchy melody after another in a homogenous post-Wagnerian bowl of tripe. I attempt, in my early works, the unify the fields as Dr Hawking would have it; to say good music can be tonal or atonal or some arbitrary blend of both; while re-affirming the concert hall as the place for profound expression, rather than a bourgeois spectacle for waving imperial flags. My music is intended to sound good, beautiful or challenging; and I am far from filling my emotional pallette. At the same time I explore old forms, new forms, on their aesthetic merits rather than from any ideological faith. I don't seek the rather patronising ideal of appealing to the people, in the way Shostakovich was forced to. The people are as varied in their tastes as they are in skin-colour; appealing to some lowest denominator would do my soul no good at all. We're back to the bog roll ad again.
As my work develops I will get more confident in my own path. If there is a general fault with the work so far it is a certain caution in experimenting with the forces of sound. In the future I hope to engage more clearly with the philosophy of sound; concepts as to the limits of performance; a general attempt to move from mere competence towards a virtuosity of sorts. Variety is the key, only achieved by taking risks; and risks are dangerous to heart and head. The musical score is but one means of expression, an ancient, cumbersome, rhetorical medium that sets its musical statements in lead. Written music can be replaced by or interchanged with improvised music, or any other methods of producing sound. One work I can perceive for the future is a concerto in which the soloist repeatedly uncorks a bottle of wine and pours that glug-glug-glug first glass, accompanied by, I don't know, how about pizzicato violas and two French horns in canon. Cheers !
© Richard Russell 2004
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