Play It Again: An Amateur Against The Impossible

The Fong way to play scales takes us from how to sit (‘I sit forward on the piano stool. If you sit right back on the stool you lose that ability to move’); tempo (‘Choose a tempo where you can keep the pulse and not hesitate. If you go too fast then you are simply practising being hesitant’); what we should be doing with our thumbs (‘Off the keyboard when I’m not using them. It’s easier to play legato like this’); the importance of thinking in terms of groups of notes (‘Like we group letters when we read a book’); the need to vary practice rhythms, and the necessity of regular practice (‘Three scales each week’).

With a woodwind instrument you’re using your hands, tongue, lips, eyes, arms, ears, fingers, upper body and even feet as ways of producing sound, keeping time, signalling to others and merging into the lines, beats and washes of music around you. My daily twenty minutes is one thing: this weekend of shared music-making has been intense, life-enhancing, restorative.

‘You know the Death of Theatre,’ he says, ‘which has now been going on for 400 years? It’s been dying since it was born really, as we know. Always reaching out for youth and young people, which is great. But I wonder whether there aren’t experiences in people’s lives that happen later. I don’t think I ever went to the theatre in my 20s. I certainly didn’t go to any concerts. Perhaps it’s just part of growing up – well, you’re not growing up, but growing older. I mean, you kind of – I just – need something, I just need something.’

Harrison Birtwistle, the British composer defiantly un-medalled and with a piece of yellow insulation tape wrapped around one arm of his glasses. He pounces on me for the supposed lack of classical music coverage in the Guardian. I reel off the names of the people who write regularly for us – including at least two critics who are passionate and knowledgable about modern music. ‘Yes, but they just write reviews,’ he says. ‘What happened to the essays that people used to write?’ He refers to Tom Service’s recent review of his violin concerto in Boston – ‘A year out of my life and just a small review.’

As I practise in the piano room later in the afternoon, I see the sun dappling the water and the bullet shape of brown trout nosing up and down the stream looking very curious at their new existence.

The papers are reporting some new scientific research which shows, in the Daily Mail version, that ‘Those childhood music lessons could pay off decades later – even for those who no longer play an instrument – by keeping the mind sharper as people age’.

more than that, what was really surprising was to be reminded of what it was like to play for people whom you loved; and friends and others, many of whom had never actually been in a situation where they were in a room with someone, whom they knew, performing something at least competently. You know, the whole amateur world, the whole way in which people used to make music for each other, is gone. So the experience of going to somebody’s house, or sitting in a studio ten feet away from somebody who you actually know, who is playing something, is . . . I was very moved by how moving this was for them. I don’t mean this in an egocentric way. I mean the general experience of having music as an intimate thing shared between people who know each other and love music, this was really extraordinary for me to see.’

Now he never plays from November to February (too cold) and when he does give concerts he gives them on Saturday afternoons. This is so he can go to sleep afterwards; so that New York audiences don’t get mugged and so that his audiences don’t fall asleep in mid-sonata. The modern style of piano playing is, he says ‘more notes than spirit. They play a little bit more like a typewriter than with spirit.’

Popular music and classical music was one thing up until around 1920. Let’s put it more concretely: 1911, when atonality started. And then you have wonderful pop composers that were still steeped in a classical tradition, people like Gershwin, Cole Porter. Cole Porter, wonderful composer. I love Cole Porter.
‘And then classical music became impossible to understand, with the twelve tones, and with the set theories and all of this . . . the layman couldn’t understand it. And pop music became, on the other extreme, too simple, no counterpoint; no involved melodies. And I think this relationship between the pop and the classical is very important because it’s the memories. You get your memories not only from the great music but from the simple pop tunes. Schubert wrote waltzes, which are gorgeous melodies, and they somehow stay with you. Or Cole Porter’s and Gershwin’s, Frank Loesser. And I think when that went . . . You get two extremes and separation.’
‘And a separation between professional and amateur as well?’
‘That’s right, exactly. So the amateur can’t pick out the tune in any modern music, so they feel lost from the contemporary scene. Even the professional musician can’t, and so there’s a disparateness. When you try to play classical music you get into a ghetto. Some solutions people have suggested, like a performer should wear a lounge suit, they’re superficial. The problem is the language . . . I don’t know if it can be fixed, but we’ve broken down the language between pop and classical. And this has resulted in a rigidness; there’s become a metronomisation instead of free tempi – a kind of rigid aspect to classical music that, I think, is destructive to it. This idea of perfection that comes with recording is a very annoying one, but it’s a deeper thing.

Yeah, and it feels absolutely healthy. The complaint that I’ve had about classical performance culture for a while, is that we’re surrounded by this highly specialised, highly professionalised, proficient culture of performance which yields, generally, excellent performances night after night in concert halls. I seldom go to a performance in any leading concert hall that goes below a certain base level of technical proficiency, but it doesn’t so often rise far above that level. There are thousands of very good performances and rather few really great ones. So I think this moment in which everything is starting to seem much more chaotic and a sort of a partial breakdown in the filters that have controlled who becomes known, in a sense, who finds an audience, [is healthy] . . . In a way it does feel like a return to the culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, except now on a global scale as opposed to a much more local scale. I think it’s just fundamentally healthy for this system, this rather monolithic and highly routinised classical system – the agencies, the orchestras, the conservatories (above all, the conservatories) are at the heart of this system, the publishers for composers, record labels. You know, it is being shaken up in an interesting way. Critics as well, of course. We now have so many voices outside of newspapers and magazines on the internet and I think that’s healthy too.’