a musician's life is full of surprises there's never two days alike and I never
know what I'm going to find in my inbox in the morning and looking back over the
years I realized how much of the shape my professional life is taken as a
result of just chance encounters one of the significant early ones was when I
met Sir David Wilcox who was a mentor to many of us in the
musical world in England and far beyond actually he was director of music at
King's College Cambridge and when I was a young student I was assigned to one of
his harmony classes and at the end of one of the sessions he said oh I hear
you've been composing may I see some of your work and yes of course mr. Wilcox
and they're bringing along a nine o'clock tomorrow morning which I did a
pile of pieces among which was the Shepherd's Mike Carol and it was thanks
to that that I first made that leap from being an aspiring composer to a
published composer and that would never have happened if I'd been assigned to a
different harmony class but it was purely because Sir David was until
shortly before his death one of the editorial advisors for Oxford University
Press music department I would never have had the temerity to show my work I
was only a student for goodness sake I wouldn't have had the temerity to show
it to a publisher but I didn't have to because he did it for me so that was a
surprise a total amount of surprise and it really started me on the path that
I've been on ever since and I feel I'm returning to my earliest roots when I
write for choir because I sang in my school choir my mother kept my early
school reports and years later she showed me the one I had when I was
barely five years old and it had you know reading good for his age you know
writing needs to beat idea arithmetic John has some
cents for numbers which she doesn't and then singing said John sings well if he
sings softly so maybe I was a little bit of a vocal show off at that age but I do
remember that singing in my school choir was a great joy and I just wished that
every school day would just be quiet all day and so a life in and around choral
music has been a great joy you never feel you want to retire or step back I
know that I don't am i a composer or am I a songwriter I think I'm half and half
I was trained in composition my background is 100% classical in that
sense and yet I've never been ashamed to write a key signature or write a tune
and that's kind of out of step with what's been happening in the world of
concert music and opera for more than a hundred years now really and it's a
funny thing because if you wanted to be a composer at any time in musical
history up to about the late 19th century if you didn't have an
outstanding melodic gift you wouldn't last 10 minutes those guys all could
knock out a fabulous tune you know bar Handel Beethoven that's Schubert etc and
the funny thing was that as the century progressed different sorts of music
split like a road that divides and on the one hand you get what you could
loosely call high art music vogner say and on the other hand you get popular
music and if you think about it I can't imagine that vogner could have written
the Blue Danube and he wouldn't have wanted to and I can't imagine that
Johann Strauss could have written Tristan and his older they were
specializing in from areas of writing and of course as
high art music in the 20th century began to experiment and to develop other areas
of music than melody texture harmony new kinds of orchestration new sound worlds
do BC a great pioneer Stravinsky and so on melody kind of crept out of the
window because it was not really relevant to the sort of music that these
guys wanted to write and I'm not sure that in the sense of what you could call
hummable tune it's ever come back into high art music on the other hand melody
wanted to take up and resident somewhere and moved into the areas of operetta
then of course the musical and the musical theater and popular song jazz
blues folk music there dripping with melody all through the whole of the 20th
century but generally the people who specialized in songwriting didn't do
what you could call extended composition now George Gershwin was the great
exception because of course he was able to write hit after hit but yet he could
write porgy and bess which is a fabulous full-blown opera that actually vogner
would have been proud of you know but I've always regretted that kind of
parting of the ways and I've tried with the music that I've written to see if
there can't be some kind of reconciliation whether you can't write
music which is informed by the techniques of classical composition but
yet has recognizable tunes in it I hope that that is possible if you listen to a
lot of my work there's clearly an influence of the musical theater and I'm
not ashamed of that I mean I would admit Jerome Kern Richard Rodgers Gershwin
Irving Berlin all of those guys as influences and something I think they
understood so well is that melody is a great carrier of words that a wonderful
tune will carry the sense of a text right into the heart of the listener and
that's something that should never be lost in music and I don't think it has
been lost but I certainly set great store by melody I wouldn't say melody
has to be everywhere in music by any means but it does have an importance for
me and I think that will always remain so when you do write a melody I think
it's nice if there's a sense that it's inevitable that you can't imagine it
having been written any other way and that in some sense it feels as if it's
always been there and you've known it all your life even
though it may be quite fresh and different and there has to be some sense
I think of rightness and oh gosh that can be a struggle it's not easy to craft
a team that the world will remember but it's worth the try
the thing that has given me almost most satisfaction just to look at the coral
scene internationally is how much the standard has improved since I started
out as a kid there were really not that many good choirs by the standards we
would now judge in those days I'm talking of the 1950s really where if you
had an acapella piece that began in G major you had very little confidence
that it would end in G major there was a likelihood it might be somewhere south
of F major in fact by the time you'd finished no choirs sinking in pitch was
something that I got used to and you know what it's pretty much disappeared
we just don't expect that anymore and so to have been involved in an area of
music where both the professional level and the students a non professional
level the standard has risen so spectacularly over more than 50 years
I'm looking at now and that's being of good area to be in because it's an area
of the musical world which is being climbing and is reaching quite a high
not just in America but in many of the countries that I visit I don't know
whether I'm a good teacher really I certainly hope that the young people I
work with will take away something from experiencing the classics that I perform
with them I hope and I think I know that I have taken them into a realm that they
perhaps weren't aware of I've opened a door to another room and it's a great
feeling when you know that you've been the agent of that transformation in
people's lives I think what I would hope is that no one loses interest in the
classics I very much welcome the diversity that has come into our
thinking about repertoire choices we live in an era
of the instant mixtape and that's great because sometimes it's like in cookery
putting unexpected ingredients together just gives you something that you
wouldn't have had if you'd stuck with the tried and tested but at the same
time we must remember that our bedrock is the classics I think the message I
would give young people and they probably know this already they could
give me advice I should think is be aware that it's a very tough and
demanding discipline do not enter the musical profession if you would be happy
doing anything else because it's a profession with many setbacks many
disappointments many rebuffs you cannot be assured of success you cannot even be
assured of steady employment enough money to live but yet the professional
musicians I know who have achieved any success at all are usually well rather
driven people I think I'm probably a rather driven person
I'm not very good at leisure pursuits you know I may develop hobbies as I get
older but so far not much success on that front because my hobby is turning
from one area of music to another but I've had enough of composition then I'll
have a spell of conducting or whatever but there is a sense that you're
fulfilling your destiny that I've sort of fee it must be a little bit like
religious ministry that you just feel a call to it and you don't choose it it
chooses you and if you're going to be a professional musician you probably will
no but I think a little bit like marriage if there's any doubt the
answers probably