John Rutter interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 28th January 2009

0:09:07 Born in London in 1945; parents lived over the pub run by my grandmother opposite Baker Street tube station, 'The Globe'; like many people my parents couldn't find somewhere to live at the end of the War and gratefully accepted the rather nice flat above the pub; we lived there for the first ten years of my life; it was a busy part of London but only five minutes from Regents Park which was, and still is, idyllic; remember Queen Mary's rose garden where we would sometimes walk; not very far from Hampstead Heath where my parents moved when I was ten; for the first time they were able to afford a mortgage and a car of their own, a Standard 8, which was a proud possession; they did not have much money; my father worked in industrial chemistry; like many people in the Depression he had missed the opportunity to go to university and had left school to help his mother in the family business; he made up for that later through London University where he was able to do a PhD; I remember when I was small, him with his papers set out on the table; his subject was paper chromatography which meant little to me except it involved round circles of blotting paper called chromatograms; he became Dr Rutter during my first decade; my mother stayed at home and looked after me; I was nine when my sister was born and then they needed to move to something larger; at that point we went to live just off the Finchley Road, a little nearer to Highgate School where I had just started; it had been my father's old school, a boys school where there was a strong musical tradition; by that point it was apparent that I had a strong musical inclination; I am told that somebody came to the house and heard me singing when about seven or eight, and noted my keen musical ear; asked my parents if they had considered putting me in for a choristership; I don't know why but I refused to do the audition; I think my parents knew that I didn't want to live away from home; what they did do was send me to a school where there was a fine chapel choir and strong musical tradition; that is where I began my serious schooling at the age of nine; I had previously been to a local nursery school; we sang hymns in assembly every morning, my first experience of group singing; I realized that I really loved it; I was always hopeless at sport, but the singing lesson or the assembly at the start of the day were always the high points of my school day; I enjoyed other lessons, but music was what made the day special

6:11:11 I am short-sighted and started to wear glasses at eight or nine; the short sight was inherited from my mother; I saw the blackboard in kind of impressionist blur so it is surprising that I did as well as I did; I think they spotted this and I first of all moved to the front and then had an eye test; my eyes have not got any worse since my early twenties; I suppose the upside of my short-sightedness is that my night vision is good; my father was typical of his generation, had had a middle-class upbringing in Newcastle where his father had been a marine engineer; my father was rather reserved and quiet, a scientist by training, and rather discontented in the job that he did; he worked for various of the food industry giants, finally Cadbury's, and spent his whole working life in a job he really didn't like; his hobbies were important to him as a result; he loved target shooting, which I find inexplicable; at weekends he would go off to Bisley with me, expecting me to be impressed, which I wasn't; he tinkered with other hobbies, some of which were aimed at making money, none of which did; in the late 1950's there was a craze for model planes and he designed a rocket fuel, a hobby I shared to some extent; he later became interested in free-lance chemical research; his world was not my world; he did take me to his laboratory and showed me microscopes etc.; I was fascinated, but it never took, though at some time when young I thought I would be a scientist like my dad; he, in turn, did not really belong to my world of music; he was fond of it but never had any musical training; he could play by ear rather badly but never sought to improve his technique; I think his taste only ran to the dance band hits of his youth; later I found out, but not until after his death, that he was very proud of my achievements; he was possibly more overtly affectionate with my sister, perhaps because she came along later and unexpectedly, or because she was a girl, perhaps because I was quite difficult and reserved myself; my mother was impulsive and emotional; she had hoped for an education but because of the War it was denied her; she was younger than my dad and at the time might have gone on to some professional training in acting, which was what she really wanted to do, but the War came and she had to work; she found a job for more or less the rest of her life as a telephonist because she had a lovely cultured speaking voice; her mother was a publican and had originally been from the East End; there was a bit of old cockney in my dearly loved grandmother's voice which neither my mother nor her sister inherited; my mother worked for Western Union in the heart of the City during the war, a very dangerous place to be; thus she was thwarted, partly by the War, partly by motherhood as they couldn't afford childcare; she did act in an amateur capacity and I remember going to productions that she was in where her talent was quite highly praised; later, when I went to university, she decided to do GCSE's and a couple of A levels; I admire her greatly for that; she was a loving mother; because she knew absolutely nothing about music, neither she nor my father were ever anything but encouraging, but they could not warn me that it is a rather precarious profession where only the very talented will succeed; in some ways they were the best kind of parents if I couldn't have parents who were professional musicians; I think that I had a clear sense that music was what I wanted to do from very early on

14:56:16 Began to learn on an old, out of tune, upright piano; it was on the top floor and had somehow been winched in as it certainly wouldn't go down the stairs again; I was probably about four or five when I discovered it; I raised the lid and began picking away at the keys and discovered a world that somehow was my world; the interesting thing was that I played by ear tunes that I had heard on the radio or hymns I had sung at nursery school; I always preferred making up things of my own than playing what had already been written; before I was learning music in any formal sense I was improvising and giving fantasy titles to my improvisations; somebody then bought me a book of scales and not long after, my parents realized that this was something that was taking wing in my heart; I was sent to a wonderful lady, rather stern and forbidding, called Mrs Melville, and I had a weekly lesson with her in Kentish Town; she realized that I was never going to be a great pianist but I did have a nice voice; she concentrated more and more on giving me songs to sing and accompanying me; the sad thing was that by the time I really wanted to play the organ at fourteen, it was really too late; I never had a strong desire to play another instrument as I already knew I preferred writing and singing; it all took off when I went to Highgate School; we had a fine music master in the junior school called Martindale Sidwell who was the Director of Music at Hampstead Parish Church which was almost like a cathedral in the standard of its choir; it was customary then for quite a few ex-King's choral scholars who were in London to join that particular choir; he came into Highgate Junior School and helped to teach me singing and tried to recruit me for the church choir but for some reason I resisted; I would have learned from it; music was quite an important part of the curriculum throughout the school and really it is to school rather than home that I owe my early instruction

19:25:22 I started junior school at ten and progressed to the senior school almost on my thirteenth birthday; it was mostly a day school with about a quarter boarding; I was a day boy and started going by bus, and later by bicycle; I was very lucky because my parents could barely afford it; I won a scholarship on entry to the senior school which did lower the cost considerably, but my mother wasn't earning until a little later; my father's salary was probably fairly meagre despite his qualifications, but I think they really did want to give me a good education, so I owe them a great debt; my sister was fortunate in that Camden High School for Girls was a state school but with a high reputation academically, so she got her education free; my parents could scarcely have picked a better school for me because the school choir was really renowned at that time; we were the choir of choice for symphonic works done in London that needed a boy's choir - 'Carmina Burana', the Mahler Third Symphony, and most famously, the Benjamin Britten 'War Requiem'; we were called in because we were good and local; I vividly remember that it was a great day when we were chosen for the recording of the 'War Requiem' in 1963; by that point my voice had changed but I got in as a rather squawky alto; to just be a fly on the wall at an event like that where we knew musical history was being made was extraordinary; that wouldn't necessarily have come to me if I had gone to a cathedral choir school; I would have had other experiences, but we did have a fine school chapel choir where we did cathedral-type repertoire, so I got to know quite a lot of the same music Sunday by Sunday; we had to attend on Sunday for the boarders' service, and every morning we had a fifteen minute act of worship; it didn't in the end make a religious man out of me but it gave me a working repertoire of a couple of hundred hymns, large chunks of the Bible, bits of the Psalms, all of which are in my mind still; mine was the last generation which experienced the King James Bible; the New English Bible came in during my sixth form years; we had a slightly avant-garde chaplain who thought we should experience the shock of the new; all of us groaned because, ignorant and young as we were, we appreciated the rhythms and cadences of fine English; those were still the days when public reading was taken seriously and members of staff and some boys read every morning; it was a remarkable school which academically did a very decent job with all of us; I disliked the sport and was made to do more than I wished as I thought it a waste of time; perhaps, mistakenly, I thought I didn't want to waste time on things that weren't going to be relevant in my later life; Cambridge followed on in a very natural sort of way because my Director of Studies in the sixth form in modern languages, John Dare, had been at Clare; he later became Headmaster of Bideford Grammar School; he was fairly young and had been at Clare in the 1950's and suggested it to me; it chimed with what I was beginning to think; my first thoughts about Cambridge came with hearing King's College choir on Christmas Eve, but also from the recordings; we had a number of them in our school record library from the Boris Ord era and the early David Willcocks era; I remember thinking I want to be where all this happens; something in me said I was not going to apply to King's as I was intimidated by its reputation; also my Headmaster was adamant that I should apply for a scholarship in modern languages which was half of what I was doing for A level, the other being music; he discouraged music as being very chancy and I actually did the A level by subterfuge in collusion with the Director of Music, Edward Chapman; by the time I met him at Highgate he had been teaching there for the best part of forty years; he had been organ scholar at Pembroke, Cambridge in the early 1920's and he remembered being the last candidate examined for the degree of Bachelor of Music by Stanford, who was then Professor of Music; Chapman came down from Cambridge, taught briefly at Portsmouth Grammar School, then came to Highgate where he taught for the rest of his days; he obviously thought Cambridge was the place where I should go, and encouraged me to do music; the problem was that my musical gifts were not as apparent as if I had been a performer; I was at school with John Tavener who is now hugely noted as a composer, but at the time in the school was thought of equally as an extraordinarily gifted pianist; we also had Howard Shelley, another fine pianist, who later won all kinds of awards for his recordings of Rachmaninov; I was less obviously gifted; I composed but felt under the shadow of John Tavener; actually, several of us composed; it was encouraged by Edward Chapman who himself learnt composition from Charles Wood, Stanford's successor here; that was in the honourable tradition of the organist-composer, which has quite died out now as organists are too busy and specialized; Charles Wood, as Director of Music at Caius, was, and so was Edward Chapman, who was a good organist and would compose quite regularly; he understood voices and instruments, and what worked, and had a lovely sense of text-setting; had he chosen to devote himself to composition he might have become quite noted; there was quite a clan of active musicians at Highgate; of the school which numbered 650, almost half were in the concert chorus; not only was there every encouragement to compose but also to hear our work performed; there was an annual school music competition where you got extra points for the number of instruments you included in the instrumental ensemble class; there were twelve houses in Highgate School and therefore there were at least twelve active arrangers under the terms of the music competition; when I look back it was remarkable, and many of us became professional musicians, not just Tavener and Shelley, but Andrew Lloyd Webber’s orchestrator David Cullen who was actively composing at the time I was there; Brian Chapple who specializes in writing educational music; one of the reasons I got into composition professionally was because I was encouraged to think of it as normal; encouragement is important, and Edward Chapman, to whom I would shyly hand in my compositions, would give me a sharp critique but never a discouraging one; I remember him writing glowingly in a school report at a time when I was getting quite bad ones; thought it was a good reason for going on with music as I had someone championing me; he wrote that he thought that my talent would take me into composition and that I would go to America; extraordinarily prophetic as quite a lot of my career has taken place in America where my work was recognised almost before is was widely recognised here; another thing I remember him saying was that when I was at Cambridge I should get to know David Willcocks; I didn't have to try as I was placed in his harmony and counterpoint class in my second year; I think it is fair to say that David talent-spotted me; I look back at the huge debt I owe to Highgate and the friends I made there; somehow composition became cemented into me at an age when a lot of young people would have doubts; I did think of playing for safety career-wise; in the mid 1960's we probably didn't worry as much about careers as we do now; there was fairly full employment and one sort of assumed that a graduate would find some sort of job; I don't think that until I found that my work was beginning to sell that I thought I could make a living from it

34:34:13 I am friend, fellow traveller, and agnostic supporter of the Christian faith; in my early days, people described themselves by default as Church of England if they didn't really have any religious affiliation; my father's family were Quakers, something his sister clung onto until the end of her days, but he lost that and never attended church or spoke of anything religious until the end of his life; then he began attending the nearest church to their home in Finchley Road which was actually Presbyterian; I think he sought Confirmation then; I had not done so when at school where the Chaplain felt it had to be a positive decision; don't remember whether I was disinclined, lazy or rebellious, and I didn't like the Chaplain, but I didn't; I sang in the chapel choir and was always interested in religious studies, but somehow being a non-joiner became a habit; although I think I probably was religious in quite a powerful sense when I was young and into my twenties, not least because I felt so lucky as my career began to take off and things began to go well for me; as a composer you are a member of a pretty elite club; each night I would give thought to how lucky I was and to others who were not so lucky - a kind of theology of gratitude; probably can't take it very far because what happens when something goes wrong in your life? - the sense that there must be some benevolent deity behind all this is a bit like American religious thought; when I began to travel to America I started to meet an awful lot of Christians; some of them were good-time Christians who thought they were blessed by God because they were uniquely good people; the American faith world contains some of the very finest and most searching of theology and religious thought and practice, and some of the worst; I have experienced the full spectrum; religion matters intensely to Americans which I found out quite quickly; I respect that, and all religious faiths, but if I wanted to be honest about my own faith journey it has been backwards over the years; I am afraid what slightly began to sow the seeds of doubt was seeing the absolute certainty of religious adherents in America, and some of the harm that that certainty could lead to; I started by thinking there must be many paths to God and went from there to a rather tougher position which is that the universe is basically numbers, and in some sense mathematical and a lottery; if there is a controlling deity he is a bit like a Mafia don who is capable of doing good and charitable things, but also almost takes pleasure in doing malicious and harmful things, sowing the seeds of long-running dissent and problems; that is hard to reconcile with the Christian concept of a loving God; I don't find it helpful either to say that you have to have a personal relationship with Jesus; numerous of my religious friends say that if you are not born again and if Jesus is not your personal friend, then you are not a true Christian; I always remember the words of the Rev. Professor Charles Moule, a most searching theologian, who said he was perfectly sure he had only been born once; my personal dislike of the evangelical mindset is the style of worship and thought that it goes with, which completely runs counter to everything I have been trained to believe as somebody who has had the kind of education I have had; people sometimes have asked me whether the fact that my son was killed affects my faith position; it happened in 2001 when he was nineteen and a student here at Cambridge, and he got run over crossing Queens’ Road one night; completely unforeseen and random, but I think that the answer is no, as by then I wouldn't have described myself as a believing Christian; on the other hand, you have to consider the alternatives; a world without any churches or space for religious thought or contemplation, or based only on material values, would be a hell; in a sense, if you believe the specific doctrines of the faith, I think that just the statement it makes about how man should not live by bread alone, is immensely important; music is a part of that because it is useless in a literal sense, you don't have to have music to survive, yet it has always been there; imagining a world without it is impossible, as is a world without faith; even though you might say that religion is an invention of man, I don't think it invalidates its worth; why I think that we create a God that suits us is that I began to visit American communities, and see different churches of many denominations; if you meet Southern Baptists, they believe in a God that doesn't go in for much rational thought, a God that is judgemental and supports Republicanism; on the other hand, if you go to a major university you might find a very different image of God in the university chapel; it began to look to me as if the whole edifice of religion was a man-made construct; I do remain hugely sympathetic to the church, its music, its liturgy, its traditions, and, with some caveats, its ministry; on the whole, the Church I was baptised into, is trying to do good in a difficult situation, and is making a statement on behalf of qualities like compassion, forgiveness, charity, that everybody would support; I would be heartbroken if the Church of England closed its doors tomorrow; I hope to be buried in a country churchyard with a funeral service according to the 1662 Prayer Book, and all my favourite pieces of music; I suppose that is wanting it both ways - both the trappings without necessarily subscribing to the doctrine; I think there are quite a lot of people like me; Vaughan Williams was similar in that he had a sense of generalised spirituality which was triggered by things like standing on top of the Malvern Hills and contemplating the beauty of nature, or walking through the west door of a cathedral and being awestruck by the grandeur and mystery of the building, or being inspired by 'Pilgrim's Progress'; I think he would not have called himself a Christian, yet his life was steeped in Christianity at every point; I am like that and my moral compass probably does derive in large part from Christian ethic and teaching; I owe Christianity a huge debt and it is rather ungrateful of me not to believe in it more

48:54:19 Stravinsky said that when he wrote the 'Rite of Spring' that he was just a vessel through whom the music passed; that was really the debate at the heart of Peter Shaffer's play 'Amadeus'; if you believe that there are some humans who are chosen to be a conduit then why is it that that particular job is given to the undeserving as well as to the deserving; there is no answer, but I do think that there is such a thing as genius; if I didn't believe that I think that I would pack up; I haven't got it, but it does reveal itself; it is not the same thing as talent; genius is something that transforms life, is memorable and you never forget it; music is a very good way of expressing it; mathematics must be another because in both cases they are rather pure; music is pitched sounds which vibrate in strict arithmetic ratios, and the stricter the ratio, the more beautiful the sound; the mystery of a major chord is extraordinary; the ancients believed that this in some way tied in with the music of the spheres and the order of creation; I'm not sure that there isn't something in that; I don't know why some composers have genius, but I think they probably are in some way messengers from another world, and they are just chosen; usually those who have been chosen work very hard indeed, and those that don't squander their gift, are driven; we are all driven in the world of music and it is very hard for any of us to relax with other things; I have tried in recent years to take up the hobby of sound recording which I find absorbing and relaxing, but different, but there is always something, rather as I imagine an addiction would feel like, that calls us back to the writing table; I don't compose full-time and have always divided my energies between composition and conducting, and earlier on, teaching, I still feel bad if I haven't written anything for weeks or months; I am a quite reluctant composer as I don't terribly enjoy the time I spend doing it; it is very demanding and tiring, and only intermittently fruitful because many of us have days when nothing useful comes; you always try to write something, and I try to be disciplined about the hours that I keep when I am working on a piece; I always used to have excuses not to compose when I was at home as there were always distractions; I thought I would find somewhere completely isolated and that is where I go to compose, and only to compose; it is a small cottage five miles from where we live in Duxford and it is lovely; however, I can't tell you truthfully that the hours I spend there are all that happy; I am glad when the end is in sight, when I can see that it will only take another day or two; that is a great feeling, and having a piece finished is good; I feel relief for a while and then the process of performance begins and I may or may not be involved in that; sometimes I am due to conduct a premiere myself, and that is great, sometimes I am just there in the audience; it is an exciting moment when you hear the music for the first time in real life rather than just in your head; that is what we live for, I think, much more than any reaction anyone has to it, even though I have always been a commercial writer; it is really whether I am pleased with it; C.P.E. Bach put it rather well when he said that if you don't please yourself you can't hope to please anyone else; because I have been commercially successful people accuse me of just targeting my non-critical audience and writing down; I hope I don't do that; I do try to write simply because when I think back to my dad, he had no musical learning, but I think he could recognise music that spoke from the heart; you can write for a sophisticated and knowledgeable elite but I have never felt called to do that myself; possibly because I was for some time an only child, possibly because my parents weren't musicians, I have felt some need through the music I write to be accepted; Leonard Bernstein said the same thing; I do like to be inclusive and accessible

58:01:14 On genius, I put Bach at the top of the tree; Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn - there is a particular moment in the eighteenth century when somehow everything came together in a particular bit of Europe; Handel also, and Palestrina, but the great thing about Bach etc. was their universality, they had a go at just about every form of music then available; the Renaissance writers tended to focus on one thing and the same became true a bit in the nineteenth century, where you associate Chopin with piano music and he didn't ever try to write an opera; you can never grow tired of Bach and I think most musicians would tell you the same, that he had a mathematical IQ with noughts on the end, just to plan his works with the intricacy he was able to, and yet such a sense of joy and communication; that is really, for me, genius; it is different from talent for which you could try Telemann, for example, who was much higher in public esteem in their lifetime but look what has happened to him now; Vivaldi was, I think, a very diligent master craftsman with flashes of genius; his problem was lack of universality because I associate him with a certain kind of driving energy and vitality; he is absolutely Venice in the eighteenth century, he was admired by Bach, but I couldn't put him up in the same league; there is a very well filled second rank; I love the American song writers of the twentieth century like Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, Stephen Sondheim, but they never did anything else
 
Second Part

0:09:07 I know I am not a genius as I haven't written enough and that I have written has been in one specialist area; to be a genius in music there has to be a universality, and something that transcends its immediate time and place, which I don't think my work does; if you hear the things I have written they do speak to you of the choral culture of the time they were written; the little Christmas carols written in the 1960's are of the 1960's; you have to go much further than that and have a body of work in a number of different genres, I really don't; I would hope that the best of what I have done might get remembered; that is one of the reasons we compose, trying to lay your claim to a small piece of immortality; the thought that we will just be snuffed out at the end is always hard to live with; it is interesting that many musicians who perform would far rather do a concert than a recording; I am the opposite, because what I always feel about a concert is that it could have gone better, and it has all gone the next morning; a recording will potentially give pleasure for years to come; none of us knows how long our work will last; I suppose I am fairly immediate as I have mostly written for performing groups that I know in a situation that I know, but it would be nice to be remembered for some of the good things; as the works are published there are some I consider less good and feel embarrassed by; my best work is always the next piece; for most composers, their best pieces are those where they have discovered they could do something they did not know before, but there is no reason that that would be interesting to the public; in 1974 I wrote a children's opera on the theme of Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot; I had never written for the stage before and I didn't know if I could do it; it wasn't until I actually saw and heard the thing happening on a real stage that I realized it worked; the piece has not been a great success because it is well beyond the resources of most average schools to do it, but I was pleased that it did work; why some pieces get hugely favoured by the public and others don't is a mystery to all of us

4:43:03 I like to have a time of gestation before writing; I don't do commissions any more because I had a bout of M.E. which is a bit like malaria in that it is periodic; if you are a professional composer accepting commissions you have to be able to deliver on time and with M.E. you just don't know if you will be well enough; I did make a good recovery but it took six or seven years; I respond to invitations and suggestions; I am just writing a piece for Ely Cathedral's 900th anniversary; I always try to find out as much as I can about the circumstances in which it will be performed; I don't work best in a vacuum and don't think that composers ever do; you want as many parameters laid down as possible and you would like the freedom to vary them if you find them too constricting; Giles Swayne, a composter friend of mine will be asked for a ten minute piece and come up with a forty minute piece because he says that once he gets started there is no stopping him; I like parameters laid down and if I am using text I like to have time to think about it and choose it; if it is pre-existing, I search widely, but sometimes I have to write my own; David Dimbleby asked me to write a piece for the Council for the Protection of Rural England of which he was President; said they wanted something to celebrate the environment and man's responsibility towards it; you won't find anything on that theme in the Bible; in the end I had to write my own text; the text comes first with me, then I like to think it over and decide a day on which I will start writing; I then try to keep fairly disciplined hours when I switch to the music; often the deadline dictates how long I have got to write it in; people often ask whether that is terrifying or destructive, or does it help; I think it does help though too tight a deadline forces you to accept the first thing that comes into your head; that is what happens with film music and you just have to hope that what comes into your head first is good; Mozart's widow reported that he was terribly particular about the opening idea and he would discard a hundred until he got to the right one; there is usually a period when you are assembling your raw material and you have to ask yourself whether it is possible to make something from it; the whole thing about composition is that you are stretching out in time a tiny idea; from that you gradually build an edifice using technique and your knowledge of musical structure, allowing new ideas to occur to you along the way; Beethoven, describing composition, said making much out of little; musical composition is highly technical, artificial, but it does start with an idea, and that can come to you any time and any place; it will often be inspired by a text; William Byrd said that if you find the right words then the melody comes almost as if by itself; Sullivan needed Gilbert, although it was a reluctant partnership towards the end, as they could both fly higher with the other; words and music partnerships are famously difficult; I have never had a words person with whom I have had a sustained partnership though I wish I did

13:29:24 I rewrite pieces as I go along, but once completed I leave it alone; what I generally do is not publish it until after the first performance so I can make necessary changes; once published you could, like William Walton, tinker with them, but I don't; during the process of writing, if I look at the sketches afterwards, I realize that I have come a very long way from the first germ of an idea to what I have ended up with; you rather rarely hit on the idea you want immediately, or the way of spinning it out; we can see this process in Beethoven's sketch books; his first ideas for the 'Eroica' symphony are terribly banal, repetitive and dull; if he had taken his first thoughts we would have had a dud symphony, instead we have a magnificent one; you have to constantly monitor what you are doing; if I can't solve a problem in composition, I take a short nap - I thought I was the only composer to do so but was relieved to find that Leonard Bernstein did the same; the other thing is to realize that if you are not managing to solve a problem then probably it won't solve; I can take quite pleasant strolls in the vicinity of my cottage and that’s usually where ideas settle down, it is similar to the cat nap in that you switch off for a short while and let the brain do its work at a level you can't control; there is so much you can't control about composition which you have to accept; there are days when nothing comes and another which will be fruitful; I suppose one of the reasons we can be neurotic is because we are trying to control the flow of a tap that we can't switch on and off; Stravinsky when asked when he got his best ideas replied when he was working; the best you can do is create the framework and circumstances where you hope the ideas will flow; beyond that it is all technique

17:41:11 I was at Clare College for more than three years; I did my B.A. in music and then did a Mus.B. the year after where I specialized in composition and in palaeography and criticism, which I enjoyed; then I began a Ph.D. which I never finished; what really happened was that composition claimed me; I would describe the Clare years as happy and fruitful; I was in an environment where people left me alone for large stretches of time to get on with what I wanted to do; somehow, at school, although it was strongly musical, a lot of my time was taken up with things like sport that I really didn't enjoy; finally I was let loose in music and had the run of the University Library; in those days there was only one weekly supervision, but I was a self-starter and knew I wanted to immerse myself in music and the opportunities it offered; I did a bit of conducting in College, encouraged by my Director of Studies, Nicholas Temperley; this was really the start of my publishing career; it was the end of the Michaelmas term and I thought it would be nice to have a few carols in it; I had a chamber orchestra and a choir and thought there was not much material for such a combination and decided to write some; David Willcocks heard about this and asked to see the manuscripts and asked if I would like them to be published; he was and is an advisory editor for Oxford University Press music department; he took my manuscripts down to the then senior editor, Christopher Morris; this was in my third year; I got an offer of publication by return of post, so I had a flying start; that would not have happened if I had not been here, or not been in David Willcocks' harmony and counterpoint class, so there was a strong element of luck, fulfilling the prophecy of Edward Chapman; I owe David Willcocks a huge debt as I would never have had the temerity to show my work to a publisher; so fruitful years, which laid the foundations for my career, and the freedom afterwards to spend time composing at taxpayers' expense; during my Ph.D. my motivation was a bit shaky for ever completing my thesis, partly because I chose the wrong topic; it was proposed by Hugh Macdonald, my director of studies in my last undergraduate year, who suggested investigating the increasing split in nineteenth-century culture between high art and popular art; at the beginning you have Schubert writing dance music for the dance halls of Vienna, then using the same language to write a symphony, and by the end of the century you have someone like Wagner who would never dream of writing something for a dance hall as it was so vulgar, and Strauss who wrote dance music but would never have written 'The Ring'; in less than eighty years you have two cultural streams diverging; I felt I couldn't grasp it really, it was too big a topic; I would have been much safer on something like the keyboard music of Orlando Gibbons where there is a limited field which you can reasonably master; I had to get my application in during the vacation and didn't really think it through; also I was working as a messenger at the BBC to make some money; the advice of Professor Sir Jack Westrup, which unfortunately I didn't hear at that time, was don't start on a Ph.D. unless you really want to find out the things that you will know by the end of it; I realise that I didn't, was getting drawn into composition, and was working as unpaid assistant to David Willcocks and learning a huge amount from that; he took me under his wing at a time when he was very heavily over-committed, so I was able to help out with some of the routine duties that he had; that probably did me more good than finishing a thesis; it was a very happy association with Cambridge and I think I knew that I wasn't going to leave; very much to my surprise, Clare College invited me to become Director of Music; the music fellow, Peter Dennison, who had been there in the early 1970's when the College had become mixed, professionalized the choir, so that rather than have the organ scholar do it he should conduct and give it seniority and continuity; he then went back to Australia in 1975 and there was a vacancy; I was invited to take it over so that the gains made in having a good choir were not lost; the stipend was £350 a year which was not princely, but my livelihood was composition; I was given a room, and after the first year, given a fellowship; it was an immensely happy time; I had been supervising a bit and had enjoyed that teaching role; I did it until I resigned; 1975 was an exciting time to become Director when there was a message to be got across to the musical world that there was no reason adult women couldn't sing music written for boy sopranos; they would not sound the same but be just as valid; it was possibly a bit cheeky being just yards from the mighty King's Chapel in the smaller, domestic Clare Chapel, performing some of the same music; that battle has now been fought and won, not least because groups like the Tallis Scholars, mixed professional groups, were singing the kind of material that was written for boys; that set the pattern for my musical life because I continue to have a strong conducting interest but I have never held a cathedral appointment with boys and men, nor would I know how to train boys voices, but I have worked with adult mixed choirs at every level; after my four years of Directorship at Clare I knew I couldn't keep it going forever because as the choir and my duties grew, so composition was squeezed; in 1979 I resigned; Clare said they liked the idea of a quasi-professional choir in the College and I advised them to create a full post of Director of Music, preferably without a faculty post and its duties; this was a unique post in Cambridge at the time but lots of colleges have copied it here and in Oxford; it is a source of great pride to me; when I left I formed the Cambridge Singers because I really didn't know until I gave up how I would miss having a choir of my own to work with; I was asked to do a Christmas television special from Salisbury Cathedral and the director assumed that I was still in charge of Clare choir and would bring them; he asked me to bring a mixed choir even though the Salisbury choir would be singing; got in touch with Harvey Brough, a tenor in Clare, and asked him to get together twenty-four of the best singers from the Clare choir that I had worked with; he managed to do this, we made the programme, and the producer asked for the name of the choir; I suggested 'Cambridge Singers' and that was the birth of the choir I have worked with ever since, though the personnel has changed; I decided it would be a choir dedicated to recording; if I got into the world of concerts and recitals I would never do any composition; since then we have made an average of two or three recordings a year for twenty-five years now; it has been a great source of pleasure in my life; as we speak today I have just come away from editing our most recent recording which I made earlier this month with a new generation of Cambridge Singers, young professionals who have mostly been through the Oxbridge chapel choir mill and understand the style and parameters; I enjoy it and don't have the ongoing responsibility of a day by day choir; I can't imagine a life without musical performance, just composition would be lonely and sterile; it is very eighteenth century really as the division between the composer and performer only came about in the nineteenth century - Handel would write an oratorio and he would play the organ part, Mozart would direct his own operas

32:44:17 I have started a record label and a small sheet music publishing sideline; all of that has come about because of the computer revolution; in the 1980's you could first get home computers which would do things for you, and in the 1990's along came computer software which allowed you to print music; I did not use the publishing company for my own music as I am published by Oxford University Press, but one of the nice things you can do is to print music anywhere in the world and pieces which I had recorded with the Cambridge Singers could be put in print for the first time; I would get letters from people all over the world asking where they could get copies of pieces we had recorded; the answer was often that they could not as I had prepared special recording editions in manuscript; at first I would allow them to make photocopies for their own choirs, but now I can do the thing properly; music publications have never made me any money but it has been a service to the music community, I hope, and given me a bit of satisfaction in being able to share; a much bigger sideline has been the record label because computer technology has made it possible to edit recordings at home which you couldn't do until the later 1980's, and digital technology has made that possible; digital CD's appeared in 1983 so a good time to start your own record labels because you were able to do more things in house, including CD booklet design; you can be a record company with less resources than ever was possible in the past; I never particularly meant to start a record label but I was engaged to make a recording in the early days of the Cambridge Singers and the contract looked bad as I would never have recouped the cost; Jo Anne, my wife, and I went out to dinner with an A4 notepad to think about what we could do, and one of us suggested a record label; we then thought up possible names and showed them to all the Cambridge record shops the next morning to test for the best reflection of choral music; they singled out 'Collegium' though we were very nearly 'Triad Records’; it began with just one release and grew step by step with the proceeds of the last recording financing the next; the sheet music publishing came on much later; I am a statistic in the home computer revolution because what I have done was always a sideline and would not have been possible until home computers came in; I do all my own editing and my assistant does design, all within our little office in the garden

37:23:06 'Carols for Choirs 1' was produced in 1960, published in 1961; David Willcocks co-edited it with Reginald Jacques who was the conductor of the Bach Choir; this - the green book - did extraordinarily well in publishing terms and as the years went by it became apparent to Oxford University Press that there would be a market for a second volume; by 1968, when David had written a number of fine new carol arrangements, I had come on the scene with my first publications in that genre; I think David had a discussion with them and suggested me as co-editor with him; despite the huge disparity in age and seniority, I was taken on as an equal partner and we had the happiest and smoothest of collaborations; we have both got picky and meticulous minds and for things like proof reading and sorting out the details of an anthology, we both work very well together; we would have many a session over the dining room table at David's home, and the book seemed to emerge really quite painlessly; it came out in 1970, so almost a ten-year gap between volumes one and two; in 1978 a third volume was added; volume four was an upper voices, for girls' schools, and came out in the early 1980's; after that we did a compendium of the best of all four volumes, called ‘100 Carols for Choirs', and we worked together on that in 1987; I think the two of us had good chemistry as collaborators, and I thoroughly enjoyed working with him; to be associated with such a publishing phenomenon was very lucky for me in those early years of my career; a reason that we carried on was to be in touch with such a kind and supportive mentor, colleague and friend

41:20:00 I have continued to live in Cambridge with my family and I think we really have lived in a golden age for people who love choral music in this city; of course Cambridge has always been noted for its choirs, going back to Orlando Gibbons being in King's College choir in the 1590's; in modern times it is really with the coming of Boris Ord in the post-war years at King's that the recording profile began to rise; at St John's, George Guest; from then the excellence and fame of Cambridge choirs has grown and grown, given a huge boost by the coming of mixed colleges from 1972; we are now in a situation where we haven't just got two fine collegiate choirs in Cambridge but probably a dozen, and growing all the time; you can walk down Trinity Street and drop in on a lovely choral evensong any week of any term; I don't believe that there is another city in the world like it, not even Oxford though they are catching up; for the devotees of choral music this is the place to live; there are probably more gifted choir directors per square half mile in this city than anywhere else in the world; when people are questioning the extra-curricular activities of universities and cutting budgets, it is extraordinary that this wonderful flowering, nurtured by so many colleges, is taking place and growing the whole time; flying in the face of a quite depressing national trend where choral singing is struggling; State schools largely gave up on any form of single or group singing so no school choirs in many of them; the independent sector keeps it alive; church choirs are becoming extinct in many places; in Cambridge we are absolutely spoilt for choice; something rather lovely that this University has nurtured it; I am immensely proud of my university for having played host to such an extraordinary flowering, and that is the Cambridge I will remember if I ever move away; it is what a university should be