To everything in its season

Two days ago I finished my trio for flute, bassoon and piano. It has been very hard work. Up at five every morning to get those precious early hours when you can be alone with your music and only the birds for company. And they are wonderful this year in our garden! Of course we don't use any chemicals on the soil. And so we have no pests - apart from legions of rabbits and Muntjac Deer. Gardening here is a constant battle against the little loves - as any countryman will confirm. Anything precious has to be protected by rings of hawthorn clippings.

The trio has been slow, very slow. It has taken two years to emerge. I have pages of rejected ideas to bear witness to the struggle. And yet the finished work seems to flow with the ease of a limpid stream, in its best moments. Finding that simplicity is the hardest task for any artist. If you see and hear a forest of notes going nowhere, that's a sure sign that you have lost the thread.

I am very fortunate that the trio has been already earmarked for performance in July by a very talented group of local musicians. Their encouragement and belief in me have been a real strength in those dark moments - and there have been a few - when you wonder if you will ever compose again.

At 21' and with three movements, it is a substantial piece. The starting point for me were the wild and watery marshlands near Acle and Wickhampton. I love these places, in the grandeur of winter, the stillness of summer and the throbbing energy of spring.
The last movement is a sort of Aubade. I shall never forget, as a boy sailing up the river Deben in Suffolk at dawn, with the curlews and the redshank flying over. It was magical. This music is an attempt to catch that feeling of awe at the beauty of nature.

As Gerald Manley Hopkins, my favourite poet, put it:

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Harvest

Harvest time is finally here again. The great wheat field behind us throws up clouds of dust as the machines reap and bind.

This is the best time to be in Norfolk, in my view. Long lazy days of sun and intermittent showers; the occasional plunge into the North Sea, breakers and all; magical nights of moon shadows across the lawn.

After the exhilaration and relief of finishing the first movement of the Trio in April, I have been taking stock of my output, revising and editing old works, and writing short pieces for a CD of 'mood music' which a local composer and friend is publishing. I know I should finish the trio. I will.

With trepidation I listened again to 'For the Fallen'. I hate listening to old pieces in case I find I don't like them any longer. But I was left determined to do everything in my power to get this piece, of which I am still very proud, to a wider audience. I don't want to look back on my life at eighty and think, if only I had tried harder. Stuck out in Norfolk it is hard to network and make the connections so essential to raising one's profile in the world. Thank God for email and the internet. Long may it stay cheap and available to all.

New arrivals

The simplest and most touching signs of spring are the flowers that suddenly appear unexpectedly, like these small bright yellow daffodils all along the old field hedge at the end of the back lawn. Maybe they were over-shaded by the hawthorn, or perhaps they were under-nourished. Whatever the reason they came up blind year after year and have now all come into bloom.
Nature never gives up hope, not even with all the muck we heap on her.

My trio for bassoon, flute and piano is coming along slowly. It has got past the intensive care stage: out of the incubator. Most of the writing goes on in my head when I am walking around doing anything else but composing. When the ideas are at the stage that they are distracting me to the point that I have to write them down, I do so. I know it is not the way composers are meant to work. How many of us have that inspiration on tap constantly, waiting to be summoned for four hours every morning?

A Christmas present from my muse

I have written a short chorale prelude for organ on the traditional carol In Dulci Jubilo.
It was quite unexpected, a gift from my muse. I think of her as a person, rather like a guardian angel.

As I was driving over to Witton last Wednesday to practise the organ for the carol service on Friday, I asked her rather plaintively to help me. I have completed only one short piano piece in over two years. Not since I left Cambridge in 1980, disillusioned with my composing efforts and set on a career as a concert pianist, have I found it so hard to write.

And when I had all but given up hope of composing again, I found the germ of an idea while improvising on a reedy old country organ.

My new organ prelude breaks no new ground. It asks no deep questions. It is an occasional piece and does what is required of it. But at Witton on Friday, as the church-goers chatted with their mince pies and mulled wine in the flickering candlelight, I knew I had come home. Christmas is about becoming a child again, as God did.

Send these roots rain

The apple trees are bent over with their burden like people carrying bags of shopping. Damsons fall noiselessly onto the sparse dry grass, carpeting it with blue. In the hedges, blackberries are small and hard but sweet. Nature's bounty is overwhelming: the feeding of the five billion.

It could be. Although we have had no real rain for two months the harvest is in and it is a good one. Surely this island could support itself if we had to, as in war time? If money were spent on developing ways of desalinating seawater to irrigate the world's deserts and using the abundant power of the sun, the wind and the waves, we could live in a world where hunger was like the memory of a bad dream and droughts and floods were rare events.

Instead we spend trillions on vain wars and rescue packages for banks.

The tears of Mother Nature

An eerie image. We see faces everywhere: in clouds, in the moon, in rocks and trees. But this one has a resonance and a deep aching sadness.
I have been to Svalbard, where this breaking glacier lies. It is one of the saddest and strangest places on earth. I shall never forget the cold August sun rising over jagged ice and rock at Magdalenafjord, and the stones marking the graves of a dozen or so lonely whalers on a beach. Their lives must have been indescribably harsh. Or Barentsburg, that haunted far-flung outpost of the old Soviet empire. The inhabitants were brave people.

Scale

I woke at six this morning and went out to water the lettuces. As I filled my watering can from the outside tap, I carelessly let it overflow and water poured onto the pavers. I peered down. An ant was trapped on an island of dry stone, running round and round to find a way out. He would approach the meniscus, then bravely broach the wall of water, wade in for a few millimetres before turning back and trying some other spot. There was only one possible escape route. He ran along a tiny twig, first one way then the other. Both ends led to more water. Then he spotted a rose leaf a short jump from the twig. Across the narrow ford of liquid he plunged, reaching the safety of the leaf, where he would no doubt wait until the temporary flood subsided.

How important our own lives seem to us. How little we know of the rest of Nature.

Invasion of the Painted Ladies

The garden is under airborne attack. We are being invaded by dozens of Painted Lady butterflies. They are a tiny part of a huge north-moving swarm from North Africa which has landed on our shores in the past week or so.

Some of them are a little battered and storm-tossed, it is true. But it is wonderful to see them in such numbers as they weave and duck and dive amongst the spring flowers.

We don't spray. There are greenfly, slugs and snails but there are plenty of birds to eat them.

A garden without butterflies is no garden.

Musical magic

On Sunday we had a real treat. The young pianist Jessica Chan came up from London to give us a recital of Scarlatti, Mozart, Liszt, Debussy and Scriabin.

The Studio was packed - of course - and the audience listened in rapt silence to playing of maturity and mastery. Liszt's 'Rigoletto' paraphrase glittered and sparkled with cascades of diamond-dust. Debussy's first book of Images gave me the greatest pleasure. All the subtle shadings and chiaroscuro effects of this wonderful music were there, as if heard for the first time. The modernity of the sound was startling. So much that we composers take for granted in our musical vocabulary seems to have originated in Debussy's music. I believe his greatness is still not fully recognised.

Everything else worked like clockwork. The weather was early May at its best, gentle breezes fanning the warming earth. As I sat at the back, listening to the music, I heard a blackbird and a robin singing not far away.

Moments of magic that touch the soul.

Thames rolls on

I am hard at work revising 'Thames' for a possible performance in the States this summer. This guy has said he would like to programme it with other river-inspired pieces: Smetana's 'Vltava' and Schumann's 'Rhenish' Symphony. In any case, the score needs tidying and improving. I am a bit stuck in the eddies and cross-currents around Westminster Bridge, but hope to reach the sea ( or should I say the ocean?) in a week or so.

Someone in Tennessee wanted to play 'For the Fallen' on Veteran's Day in November, but I sadly had to decline the request to transcribe it as a string quartet.

'Trafalgar 1805' is being used as the incidental music for a student production of the Oresteia at Boston Unversity.

Foot-soldiers of spring

There is something touching about the first flowers of spring.

Snowdrops in a corner by the wall, pushing through ivy and dead leaves. Wild violets in the bank by the road, their deep secret perfume inspiring devotion. Primroses everywhere, never too many. Crocuses, shiny toy soldiers in paintbox uniforms. Grave Lenten Roses in their sepia dresses.

On Friday I worked all day in the garden. There was a hint of that balmy softness that is so much a part of an English spring.
For a few moments, a lark sang high above. You could almost smell the sap rising.

Even the weeds looked fresh and new.

The studio in summer

A flashback to last July, and my new border alongside the studio. The climbing rose, lovely but blowsy Madame Gregoire Staechlin, has now been replaced with a Pineapple broom, Cytisus Battandieri, on the advice of a friend of a very knowledgeable gardener friend. She was right. Pink flowers against pink brick is not a successful combination. The geranium 'Wargrave Pink' will have to go too. I am planning to plant a Clematis Armandii, which has white flowers in late winter and is evergreen, behind the broom.

Poets of the piano

This is great piano playing.

These two artists both have the power to enchant the ear with a single note. The beauty of tone they evoke from wood, wire and steel is astonishing, alchemical. There is magic in their touch. Their command of phrasing and chordal balance is masterly, their use of the pedal (the "soul" of the piano, according to Anton Rubinstein) is inspired and their fingerwork breathtaking.

The absurd snobbery of the classical music world ensures that only Horowitz is listed in the Oxford Companion to Music.

Starting Over

Candlemas. The dead of winter. The studio is a warm place to be on a bleak February afternoon. Traditionally the weather today should be vile if you want the summer to be fine. That's good. It is.

It is nearly two years since I last posted on the old Norfolk Calling blog. What has changed in that time? Well, we now have curtains and a sofa in the studio. I have had a major change of medication that has in some ways saved my life, or at least my sanity. We have re-designed the front garden and driveway.
My father died in June 2007. His sister Judy died two weeks ago. Andrew's mother passed away in December 2007. In two years he has also lost an uncle and an aunt, and his sister-in-law has lost her father and her sister-in-law.
In November 2007 we visited the States for the first performances of For The Fallen, in Chicago and Pennsylvania.
Andrew resigned from work in September to spend more time at home. We are both much happier, knowing that we shall not have to spend our fifties waiting for the chance to enjoy our time together. So maybe we will have to move one day? You can plan, and all your plans come to naught because, so often, life doesn't happen the way it should.

Things look dire on the world front, but if anyone can steer the world away from disaster I believe Barack Obama can. He has an almost impossible task, but I refuse to join the cynics, whether from right or left. Not just yet, anyway. So many leaders disappoint. We become immune to hope. But, like the old oak that Prince Andrei saw in War and Peace, those pesky new shoots grow every year from our gnarled branches. Or, as Philip Larkin has it:

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.