The Rivered Earth, page 3
VS: We’re talking in Salisbury now, in the Old Rectory in Bemerton where, in the early seventeenth century, the poet, musician and priest George Herbert lived and died; and this is where we had many of our earlier discussions about the project, including that crucial one in the red room. And when I’ve been in India or elsewhere, you’ve come and stayed here and kept the poetic and musical spirit of Herbert going – and indeed composed quite a lot of these works (as well as others) here. I know that the venue for which you compose is very important for your music. But what about the venue in which you compose?
AR: It has a huge effect on me. Take the Old Rectory, for example. I love Herbert’s poetry. Also, as a teenager, when I had singing lessons, I sang some of Vaughan Williams’s settings of Herbert, Five Mystical Songs, and I learned quite a lot from that about setting English texts to music. So for me, there was a particular atmosphere to the place where he’d lived. Besides, I loved the peace, the space, the greenery of it. And in practical terms, it was good to be able to spread my keyboard and computer and other equipment around in the red room and work on my music there – and the large table in the kitchen was invaluable when you weren’t here and it was uncluttered, especially in the third year when I had all those parts to organize.
But it was in the second year that the sense of place was most critical. The libretto for Shared Ground consisted of your poems based on some of Herbert’s own poetical forms, and you talk in those poems about your experience of living here. I knew the river that you talked about. I’d been with you when you saw the oak reflected in the flooded glade. It had an enormous effect on my setting of the poems. When you sent them to me from Delhi, I remember I found some of them difficult to set at first – but just being here, I’m sure, got me over some of those difficulties.
VS: Could you give an example or two of these difficulties?
AR: Well, the poem ‘And’ is so short – it’s basically the shortest of the texts. The first time I started looking at the text, I thought, oh, there aren’t enough words. I need some more. Then when I looked at it later, what caught my imagination were the words that begin the poem: ‘And then I woke.’ So what went before? The ‘before’, of course, was the sleep; the poet was sleeping and dreaming until the word ‘And’. And so a lullaby rhythm came to me and a four-note gamelan ostinato. The music to the text itself is shorter than the music of the sleep that precedes it, and then the sleep just creeps back in again at the end of the setting. So I was able in a natural way to make a larger piece out of something quite short. What I used for the wordless sleep bit was the Western tuning equivalent of a Javanese pentatonic mode. Then when he wakes up, and I’m setting the words, I use the star mode. It’s quite a sensuous piece.
VS: The star mode? What’s the star mode?
AR: Oh, sorry, that’s my private way of describing a particular mode I use a lot, which is built up of minor thirds and semitones alternately. I’ve used it pretty much in every year of ‘Confluences’. I first discovered it when I was composing our opera Arion and the Dolphin, by piling up alternating fifths and semitones. Then it changed its fortunes and got squished, if you see what I mean.
VS: I think you’ve lost me, Alec. But to get back to how you disentangle difficulties when composing, I remember you telling me that you had great difficulty working on my poem ‘Host’, where I talk about the house itself and my sense of Herbert’s presence.
AR: Well, I knew the house and its moods, ‘Its stones, its trees, its air, / The stream, the small church, the dark rain’. But I just couldn’t see, since it was such a personal statement, how I could get a choir to sing it in such a way that it would be intelligible emotionally – or even in terms of projecting the words clearly. Some time later, I happened to go up to London to hear Jeffrey Skidmore and Ex Cathedra (who were going to be our singers that year) perform a piece by Poulenc written around the time Paris was liberated: a most extraordinary work called Figure Humaine, set to poems by Paul Éluard. Hearing Poulenc’s work inspired me to find a solution to the difficulty of setting your text. I have a solo voice from the choir singing your words as ‘the guest’, and the choir singing the words of the stones, trees, stream, etc. And the wonderful sonorities of the Poulenc led me to constitute my forces in the same way: to divide the singers into two choirs, each of six voices – soprano, mezzo-soprano, alto, tenor, baritone and bass.
But at the end of my setting, I felt I had left things somewhat up in the air with a single voice; I needed to anchor things, to bring them back to earth – and not just in musical terms. And that’s why, immediately afterwards, I had the choir sing Herbert’s short poem ‘To My Successor’, which is inscribed in stone above the porch of the Old Rectory – and which I would never have seen if I hadn’t been staying there. I’m glad you let me interpolate it into the text.
VS: Well, it belonged. But I did refuse you permission to use your setting of Herbert’s poem ‘The Flower’ at the very end of the libretto. I didn’t want a text by me to close with someone else’s words, however much I revered him. What gave you the idea of doing that?
AR: Well, let me go back a bit. You know that that year you gave me the poems for Shared Ground very late.
VS: I know. I know. I’m sorry. Muse failure.
AR: Well, I started working on other things. One, of course, was the solo violin pieces for Ponticelli. Then Judy* got me involved in the George Herbert hymn-tune project and I decided to set ‘The Flower’. That’s another thing that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been here.
When I’d set it, the tune seemed too good to use only for the hymn, so I adapted it for the second movement of Ponticelli. Then, when I had finished both Ponticelli and the choral work Shared Ground with which it was interlocked, two thoughts struck me. First, it seemed a pity that the violin and the unaccompanied choir were never heard together, and I wondered if I could do something about that. Secondly, the final poem, ‘This’, is such a bleak poem. And I wanted there to be a sense of hope at the end.
VS: I didn’t mind you adding hope, if that was your vision of things, but not with someone else’s words!
AR: Yes, I accepted that. So I used the tune of ‘The Flower’, which I associated with hope, to create an epilogue or coda for violin and choir, but with the choir singing wordlessly. It worked for the audience – and, at the time, for me. But I’ve been having serious second thoughts about it. I feel it’s got to go. Even if the ending is bleak, it’s right.
VS: Talking of words, I seem to remember you telling me that you wanted to compose the settings for my words first, and then use those tunes and textures as a source of inspiration for the solo violin pieces of Ponticelli. Because I was so late in giving you the words, you had to reverse the order and write the solo violin pieces first. How did that work?
AR: Well, there was a musical logic to what I said, but perhaps I was also just trying to hurry you along. Anyway, I couldn’t sit around twiddling my thumbs, so I began work on the Ponticelli, the ‘little bridges’. I got a lot of inspiration from the five bridges themselves.
VS: I should mention that when you told me about the five bridges in the water-meadow, I was a bit puzzled. I could see what you were referring to as the Arched Bridge and the Flat Bridge – which cross the two branches of the River Nadder – and the Rustic Bridge over the main ditch of the water-meadow – and, at a pinch, the Bridge of Sleepers, which is, well, a sort of half-bridge made of railway sleepers; but your Bridge of Sighs mystified me.
AR [laughs]: That was a great discovery. I was walking on the path that goes around the unwooded, open part of the water-meadow. It had just rained, and there was a sort of squelchy area. But I was helped to get across it by what seemed to be a log of wood under part of the path. And when I stepped on it, it made a sort of whooshing, sighing noise. Hence the name. I loved the noise. It only happened after rain. But now, a couple of years later, it doesn’t do that any more. And the last time I tried to take that circuit, the swans were nesting there and they hissed me away.
VS: So the Bridge of Sighs has disappeared, perhaps for ever. And all that’s left of it is your ‘ponticello’ of that name.
AR: That’s right.
VS: So what did you use for ideas, since you didn’t yet have the surrounding poems or their musical settings?
AR: The bridges themselves. For two of them it was the sounds they made – the watery moaning of the Bridge of Sighs, and in the case of the Bridge of Sleepers, the dull plonking noise the individual railway sleepers made when I prodded them with my umbrella – like a giant xylophone. The Rustic Bridge was made of narrow wooden planks, some of which had been replaced with bright new wood. The sequence of old and new wood made an interesting pattern, which I interpreted as musical intervals. The remaining two bridges also provided a visual stimulus in the form of their actual shapes. If you look at my scores you’ll see that the opening bars of the music make an image of the Flat Bridge on the page, and the notation of the Arched Bridge music makes an arch shape.
VS: Really, Alec!
AR: Well, you pun quite a lot, so I don’t see why I shouldn’t – in a musical or a visual sense. Or verbally, for that matter, as with my violinistic title, Ponticelli. And, well, Herbert makes lots of puns too – serious puns for the most part – and writes some poems, such as ‘Easter-Wings’, in unusual shapes. You take your cue for your poem ‘Oak’ from that. And in fact, in my score of ‘Oak’, the choir begins by singing wordlessly, and the notation of the music on the page makes an hour-glass shape, mirroring the oak tree and its reflection in the pool below.
VS: Wordplay and shape-play! I’m not sure anyone will take us seriously if they find out how we amuse ourselves.
AR: They can judge the poems and the music on their own merits.
VS: Well, talking of punning, I’m very proud of that particularly puerile pun which came to me out of the blue – and which sums up our collaboration on the project.
AR: ‘Seth wrote and Roth set’?
VS: That’s the one! But to drift back into seriousness, here’s a thought. A writer’s book exists once it’s written. And it’s shared or received when it’s read. I don’t have to hear or see someone reading it for that to happen. And the process of reading is such a private one. I once came into a room where a friend of mine was reading one of my books, and he clicked his tongue impatiently and shooed me off. But the performance of music is different; it’s a public act. And I don’t know if a piece of music – or a play for that matter – could be said to be fully realized until it’s been performed. I mention this because someone told me many years ago that she’d been at the dress rehearsal of Arion and the Dolphin, and she saw you sitting by yourself in tears and asked you if everything was all right. And you’d said, yes, everything was all right; it was just that you’d never really believed that you would hear and see it actually performed, and that that was why you were overcome. I cannot imagine what it must be like to hear your own music for the first time.
AR [after a pause]: You know, people assume composers can hear their music in their heads. Well, even if that’s true in the abstract, it is the performers who really embody it and bring it to life – in a particular place at a particular time – and let us hear it with our real ears, not those of our minds. It’s all the difference in the world. And the audience closes the circle – their attentiveness, their reactions, even the direction of their gaze. When Songs in Time of War was performed in Wilton Church, someone said that a veteran from the Second World War had broken down as he listened to ‘Moonlit Night’. I was surprised at first, but they told me that he’d said it was exactly as it had been with him, separated as he had been from his wife by the war. To know that your music has moved someone so deeply, what could be a greater reward?
VS: That was the first year of ‘Confluences’. I remember there was a long silence before the applause. But more important than the reception and the reviews was the freedom I felt it gave us for the rest of the life of the project. There would be, as you said, no Procrustean constraint on length. A trust had been established – which made everything in the years that followed much easier. Their attitude became, ‘Go away and write and compose, we won’t bother you.’
AR: Well, the festivals had taken a big risk with us. It was good to feel we hadn’t let them down.
Songs in Time of War
Introduction to
Songs In Time of War
In the first year of the project, by the time we got the go-ahead, I had no time to write anything new, so we decided to make use of something I already had in hand. Alec had earlier set to music some poems on the gardens of Suzhou that I had written while I was a student in China. Now he suggested that he set some translations from the Chinese poet Du Fu that I had done some years later.
I had turned to these poems at a strange time. In my twenties, I had lived in China for two years, studying at Nanjing University, doing research in economics and demography in nearby villages and travelling around the country whenever I got the chance to do so. I grew to love China – in a complex sort of way. In the middle of my time there I hitchhiked home to India via Tibet and wrote an account of this journey, From Heaven Lake.
In 1989, the brutal firings on Tiananmen Square took place. For months afterwards I could hardly bear to think of China or Chinese. Then, to my astonishment – for I was in the middle of writing A Suitable Boy – I began to translate poems from three of my favourite Chinese poets, Wang Wei, Li Bai and Du Fu.
These three great poets were contemporaries, and lived in the eighth century. Du Fu’s poems are, to my mind, the most moving of all. He wrote most of the works presented here during a terrible rebellion in the Tang Dynasty, which caused vast devastation and famine. Du Fu was separated not only from the imperial court, where he was, for a while, an official, but also from his wife and family; he was later to discover that one of his sons had died of starvation.
The Chinese have always turned to their poets for solace in difficult times, so perhaps I should not have been surprised that something drew me back to them in 1989. In 2006, when we were looking for a text, the Iraq conflict was in its third year, and the waste and grief of war gave these poems, more than twelve centuries old, a new charge.
Alec declared my translations singable and arranged them in a different order to create a kind of narrative line, imagining Du Fu alone at night on the boat taking him on his final voyage along the River Yangtze, and reminiscing about family, friends, strangers, country, and the effect on all of them of the civil war. Alec wrote the work for tenor, violin, guitar and harp – to provide what he called an open texture, something less heavy than the piano, the traditional instrument for accompaniment.
We called the work Songs in Time of War. Its first performance took place in the beautiful Italianate church at Wilton near Salisbury, close to where Eisenhower, Churchill and others planned their strategy for D-Day during the Second World War.
Songs in Time of War
1. Thoughts while Travelling at Night
Light breeze on the fine grass.
I stand alone at the mast.
Stars lean on the vast wild plain.
Moon bobs in the Great River’s spate.
Letters have brought no fame.
Office? Too old to obtain.
Drifting, what am I like?
A gull between earth and sky.
2. Grieving for the Young Prince
From Changan walls white-headed crows took flight
And cawed upon the Western Gate at night –
Then on officials’ roofs they pecked and cawed
To warn them to escape the barbarian horde.
The gold whips broke, so hard were they applied.
The exhausted horses galloped till they died.
The court fled, panicked – those they could not find
Of the imperial line were left behind. *
Below his waist, blue coral, glints of jade –
I see a young prince, weeping and afraid
By the cross-roads. Although he won’t confess
His name to me he begs in his distress
To be my slave. Thorn scrub he’s hidden in
For months has left no untorn shred of skin –
But the imperial nose betrays his birth:
The Dragon’s seed is not the seed of earth.
Wolves, jackals roam the city. In the wild
The Dragon and his court remain exiled.
Take care, dear Prince. I daren’t speak long with you,
But for your sake will pause a breath or two.
Last night the east wind’s blood-stench stained the air
And camels filled the former capital’s square.
The Shuofang veterans, bright in their array,
How bold they seemed once, how inane today.
I hear the Son of Heaven has abdicated,
And in the North the Khan, it is related,
And each of his brave warriors slashed his face
– So moved were they by the imperial grace –
And swore to wipe this great dishonour out.
But we must mind our words, with spies about.
Alas, poor Prince, be careful. May the power
Of the Five Tombs protect you hour by hour.
