Igor Stravinsky

FLA 32: Joanna Wyld (09/11/2025)

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Of all the guests I’ve had on First Last Anything so far, Kent-born Joanna Wyld might have worn the most musical hats. Writer, musician, composer, librettist, teacher and administrator, she’s played in orchestras, concert bands and pop groups, she has a passion for everything from bellringing to soul music, and has been a prolific writer of articles, liner notes and concert programme notes for many years. Her writing is always so perceptive, thoughtful, colourful, nuanced and (underrated quality, this) informative.

In conversation, Joanna is no different. What follows, the highlights from a couple of hours on Zoom one afternoon in October 2025, could easily have run twice as long. I love it when a conversation with a guest introduces me to many new pieces, and this is certainly one of those occasions. We both hope you enjoy reading it, and sampling Joanna’s wide-ranging listening choices – not only her First, Last and wildcard selections, but all her other suggestions too.

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JUSTIN LEWIS:

So to begin with, what music do you first remember hearing in your home? Because I know you have a very eclectic taste – was that always there?

JOANNA WYLD:

Yes, I think ‘eclectic’ is a really good reflection of my home growing up. I didn’t grow up in what you would describe as a musical household. Everyone loved music, but my parents weren’t classically trained – my dad can’t read music but loves it, my mum can read music, and plays the piano and the organ.

We were never told that a particular genre was better than others. We had a good eclectic range of records that we enjoyed playing. I think the first record I learned to put on the record player independently was The Beatles’ ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. And there were quite a few Beatles singles, but also my brothers and I would use music to capture our imaginations a bit. Because we’d hear ‘Oxygene’ by Jean-Michel Jarre when we’d go to the London Planetarium, it would be on if you were waiting to go in. So [at home] we’d use those kinds of experiences – we’d use a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and – I mean, we were very little, it was very silly – we’d write a type of sci-fi script with ‘Oxygene’ playing in the background as our soundtrack.

My relationship with sound was affected by certain things growing up. My grandad and my dad were – and my dad still is – bellringers, which I think is a hugely underrated discipline. We rightly praise the Aurora Orchestra playing things by heart – I went to see them do The Rite of Spring by heart [at Saffron Hall in 2023] and it was absolutely mindblowing, they deserve all the credit for that – but bellringers do that every weekend, three hours or more of memorised mathematical permutations while handling these unwieldly bells. If we’re going to be patriotic about something, I feel like that’s something to be proud about, because it’s unusual and it’s such a skill.  

With bellringing, there are these interesting patterns, but also these slight irregularities because it’s not mechanised – there are people doing this, and there are also these spatial qualities of sound that you get when you hear it resonating in a ringing chamber. With the tunings, you get these harmonics, these overtones, and sometimes they seem to vibrate or clash.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

There’s that way that bells can sound slightly off-key, which you sometimes get with distance and echo. Do you have perfect pitch, then?

JOANNA WYLD:

No, and actually, I suspect my relationship with tuning is a little bit strange because I grew up with this sense of music being a little more fluid, not necessarily fitting within these strict parameters we’re used to thinking about in terms of pitch. And I suspect that then influenced my love for composition and contemporary and 20th century music later, made me open to it, because I’d grown up with this variety of sounds, without that sense of hierarchy about it.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And did you do some bellringing yourself?

JOANNA WYLD:

I did learn for a short while, but then I had an experience where a rope hit me – it is quite dangerous. My dad was there, and he grabbed it and it was fine… but I was a bit put off by that. Also, I don’t think I’ve got the mathematical brain to do all the actual methods, but I love the sound of it. It could almost be rebranded as mindfulness. If you listen, it’s got enough patterns to keep your brain interested – but it’s also quite mesmerising. I think, I hope, there is a new generation of people coming through who can do it. It’s in the category of things like dry-stone walling… almost like folk traditions. These things deserve to be continued in the least jingoistic way, just because they are interesting and skilful.

I have a CD called Church Bells of England, which is an incredibly sexy thing to own, and it has all these examples of ringing in various places. None of them are perfect in terms of the ringing or the sound quality, but they give a sense of what’s hypnotic about it. The example from St Giles, Cripplegate launches straight into these complex patterns, it’s so absorbing. And then you have composers who’ve drawn on this, from William Byrd’s emulation of change-ringing in keyboard music, to Jonathan Harvey’s wonderful Mortuous Plango, Vivos Voco, which samples the tenor bell at Winchester Cathedral. I heard it played during a London Sinfonietta concert and you felt like you were surrounded by the recording of the bell, it was a visceral experience.

——

JOANNA WYLD:

Classical music came in when we were in the car, we’d put cassettes on, and I did discover then that I really loved this music. This would have been from the age of about eight onwards… that’s when I started to play the flute.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

The exact age I started too, actually. Why did you pick the flute, then?

JOANNA WYLD:

Well, it was slightly by default, because in my primary school, which was very tiny, you could learn the piano, the violin or the flute. There were three teachers who came in, and I had more of a yearning to learn the clarinet, but it wasn’t really possible. It just wasn’t very practical – this is before we got our piano. My older brother had been learning to play the violin, so I kind of ended up on the flute because that was what was available. I mean, it took ages to get a note out of it, but it wasn’t a burning ambition to learn that particular instrument.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Yeah, I think I wanted to play the violin, but I have a feeling my parents couldn’t have coped with the idea there’d be at least three years of scraping. I seem to remember we were watching something on TV, there was someone playing the violin absolutely brilliantly, and I recall saying something like, ‘Oh I’d love to be able to do that’, and it all went very quiet in the room. So maybe that was a clue. I think with the flute, I think I liked it as a colour in an ensemble, rather than as a solo instrument. I did enjoy playing but I found solo playing quite stressful – and also I felt a bit alienated in my teens because I did want to be in bands, but I had no idea how you went about that. I learned the saxophone for a while, and that got me into bands a bit. But I told this story on a podcast recently – when I got into university, I did a music degree for a year, but obviously in the college orchestra you could only really have three flautists in there. You couldn’t really have fifteen.

JOANNA WYLD:

Yes, if you’ve got too many flutes, what do you do? I was really lucky because I grew up near the Bromley Youth Music Trust, a music hub that offers affordable music ensembles, so I grew up in a concert band system, and that’s how they deal with instruments where there are too many for a standard orchestra. That was quite a discipline in terms of ensemble playing. And so I ended up in this concert band where we’d tour and do competitions and it was quite high level, but it was a brilliant exercise in eclectic music, because in concerts you’d have stuff written for it specifically, often quite contemporary and imaginative. And then you’ve got arrangements of pop, film and classical – so a lovely kind of cross section. Music for concert band and brass band is another genre that’s oddly underrated I think. I love the ‘Overture’ from Björk’s Selma Songs (don’t watch Dancer in the Dark, it’s traumatising, but listen to the soundtrack), it’s a lovely example of rich brass writing. And the song that pairs with it, ‘New World’, is gorgeous, very powerful.

And then in the sixth form, I got into the BYMT symphony orchestra having sort of worked my way through. That was a huge experience, and I was just so lucky, because we were playing quite high-level repertoire: Britten’s ‘Four Sea Interludes’, and Bernstein’s ‘On the Waterfront’, and Dvořák symphonies, Sibelius symphonies… We played Mahler, you know! I became immersed in all this. And our teachers were phenomenal because they expected these really high standards of us, and we were living up to them. This was a lot of state-school educated people, and we were so lucky to have this affordable opportunity to make music like that. Then at university, I was exposed to more 20th century and contemporary and started to play things like the Berio ‘Sequenza’ and Messiaen’s ‘Le merle noir’, stuff which uses more kind of percussive and unusual sounds on the flute.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Tell me about Richard Strauss, who you mentioned to me was a particularly important composer you heard at a formative age.

JOANNA WYLD:

It’s his ‘Four Last Songs’ [composed in 1948] in particular. I think, for GCSE or A level music, I had heard his ‘Morgen!’ [‘Tomorrow!’]. Back in the day, CDs were quite expensive and I wasn’t buying them lots. My birthday or Christmas was coming up and so I asked my parents for Strauss’s ‘Morgen!’. They couldn’t find that on record in our local record shop so they gave me this instead – a happy accident.

I love all of the music on that record for different reasons – you’ve also got ‘Death and Transfiguration’, [a tone poem written in 1888–89] when Strauss was quite a young man, and which in many ways is not really about death but is more life-affirming, though it’s dramatic. Whereas with the ‘Four Last Songs’ everything’s stripped back, because he did tend towards bombast and vulgarity at times, and these were written when he was really facing death. They’re just four of the most beautiful things ever written. The third one in particular [‘When Falling Asleep’] just has this incredible climactic moment and wonderful violin solo. And in the final song [‘At Sunset’], you get this pair of piccolos which are the birds representing the two souls of him and his wife, off into the ether – it’s just so beautiful.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And ‘At Sunset’ quotes a little motif from ‘Death and Transfiguration’, doesn’t it, at one point?

JOANNA WYLD:

Yes, and there’s a horn solo at the end of [the second song] ‘September’ – his father was a very celebrated horn player. And through him, he’d been to hear lots of premieres of Wagner operas because his father was playing in them, and his father tried to discourage his interest in Wagner! [laughs] Anyway, so you feel as though that horn solo might have been just a nice little valedictory kind of farewell to that memory of his father as well.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I know you particularly love this specific recording of the ‘Four Last Songs’, with Gundula Janowitz singing and Herbert von Karajan conducting [first released in 1974], but I take it you know who else was a fan of it as well?

JOANNA WYLD:

David Bowie [which inspired him to write four songs for his Heathen album]. Yes, I love this fact. I’m kind of thrilled that it’s that specific recording, with Janowitz – because people are divided as to which is the best. Strauss is one of those people, like Mahler, where I have different recordings of their works because I do think people can bring something different in. But yeah, I just love the fact that Bowie loved the same recording as I do!

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Bowie’s influences just seem to come from so many places. We’re back to eclectic again, as with you.

JOANNA WYLD:

I think I’m discerning about quality, but there isn’t a hierarchy of genres. Obviously, classical is my speciality, and I’m passionate about it, but it’s all there to be enjoyed, we’re complex human beings, and Bowie obviously recognised that. I understand why people specialise, but I love to embrace variety.

——

FIRST: QUEEN: ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’/ ‘These Are the Days of Our Lives’ (EMI Records, cassette single, 1991)

JUSTIN LEWIS:

‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was first released in 1975 when I was five, and I vividly remember the video on Top of the Pops. It’s hard to remember what the world was like before this record, because it is one of the first that’s seared into my mind.

JOANNA WYLD:

And this reissue was the first record that I can remember wanting to buy. I was eleven. I heard it on the radio. It was just unlike anything else I’d ever heard. But it’s got that context of originally coming out in the mid-seventies when there was the mainstream three-minute pop song and at the same time there was prog: people yodelling or a synth solo, sometimes quite self-indulgent. But here you’ve got something that’s both: it’s mainstream adjacent and also proggy – it’s an extended idea and a concept. I just thought it was really fun, kind of dramatic and extraordinary. And that appealed.

It wasn’t that long afterwards that Wayne’s World (1992) cemented it as well. But for me it also represents a couple of things I generally find interesting about music. One: it’s the victim of its own success – as you said, you can’t imagine it not being there. Even those who don’t like it, couldn’t imagine it not being there. That’s an extraordinary achievement. And that can lead to it becoming ubiquitous and taken for granted, almost an irritant.

A parallel for me would be Holst’s Planets suite. I fell into the same trap with that – I’d just heard it so many times. And then at university, I finally got to play in it. And I realised: this is so well written, so well orchestrated, and this would have been incredibly original at the time. And it has been emulated a lot since, but I hadn’t given it enough credit for what it was, when it was written.

The other aspect of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ I find interesting: it’s so of the person who wrote it. Some composers have that instantly recognisable fingerprint. Holst is one, Messiaen, Stravinsky, Copland, more recently Louis Cole and Genevieve Artadi, both separately and together as Knower, – and I think Freddie Mercury is another, in this song. It’s him, just going, ‘I’m not going to worry about what anyone else thinks, I’m not going to draw on lots of other influences, this is what I want to write.’ I admire anyone who can do that.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

There are aspects of it that remain mysterious, like nobody has ever quite nailed what it is really about. Brilliantly, someone has put up clips of Kenny Everett actually playing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ for the first time, on his weekend lunchtime show on Capital Radio in 1975 – have you heard this?

JOANNA WYLD:

No, but he championed it, didn’t he? I haven’t done a deep dive, I have to admit.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I only found it the other day. Seems he had been playing extracts from it, and then he plays the whole thing.

Kenny Everett, Capital Radio, c. October 1975

We had this song in our house because it’s on their album A Night at the Opera, which has this ambitious mix of quite whimsical, almost music-hall songs, and then out-and-out rock tracks. I still think it’s probably their best record. I like to hear it as part of the album. As you just said with The Planets, it’s good to go back and play it in context.

But even with Kenny Everett’s support, it’s still really weird they put this out as the single, in a way. And obviously, you bought this re-release after Freddie Mercury had just died [24 November 1991]. How aware were you of that event?

JOANNA WYLD:

I think this was the first experience I had of a celebrity death having an impact, and of feeling incredibly sad. The AA side, ‘These Are the Days of Our Lives’, is just incredibly poignant. I can’t watch the video where he sort of says ‘I love you’ at the end. It’s just so, so heartbreaking. I think for a lot of people, it really brought home the reality of the HIV and AIDS pandemic. That this wonderful larger-than-life figure, famous and well-off and all the rest of it, had been hit by it. I don’t remember the extent to which I understood everything at that point in my life, but it definitely stayed with me. It felt like such a horrible shock and a horrible loss. 

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Until I was doing the research for this, I’d forgotten it was a charity single, for the Terrence Higgins Trust. Since when it’s been in so many other things – Wayne’s World as you mentioned, but just this summer, in September, at the Last Night of the Proms.

JOANNA WYLD:

The Prom was a lot of fun. I know it divided opinion a little bit, but it’s nice to celebrate people while they’re alive. I think Brian May and Roger Taylor deserve that moment. While I’m not the biggest Queen fan, and I don’t listen to the music loads, they do all seem fundamentally decent, and those remaining members have really championed Freddie’s memory and always mention him. There’s something quite loving there.

——

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I wanted to talk to you about writing liner notes for CD releases and programme notes for concerts, because that’s something you’ve been doing for many years. How did you first get into this sort of work?

JOANNA WYLD:

The first clue lies back in my childhood. We’d play classical music in the car, and one cassette we had was Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals suite [composed 1886, but only published posthumously in 1922], featuring lots of quite kid-friendly stuff. And when I went to secondary school, my first music assignment was to write the description of a piece of music. I remember spending ages on this, being so enthused by it. I went home, read the sleevenotes of Carnival of the Animals, got my little dictionary of music, did a bit of research and wrote it up. It was like a prototype for what I’d do later. It was just a Year 7 essay, I was about eleven, it wasn’t hugely in-depth, but it’s interesting that’s stuck with me as a memory – an early enjoyment of writing about music showed up.

But how I got into it professionally… I was working at a record company, originally called ASV, which also had some peripheral labels: Gaudeamus was an early music label, Black Box was a contemporary music label, everything on White Line was sort of middle of the road, like light music, and then Living Era was the nostalgia label. This was my first job after university, and I was the editorial assistant.

For Living Era, we used to get these liner notes written on a typewriter by these lovely old gents who were jazz experts, some of them virtually contemporary with the songs they were writing about! They were delightful to work with, but one day we were missing a liner note, and my boss said, ‘This person just forgot to file this copy and we really need it now. Can you cobble something together?’ And this was in the days before there was a huge amount on the Internet about these things. I think I used early Wikipedia. But because I’d edited and proofread so many of these notes already, I knew the style. So I was able to emulate that slightly chatty nostalgic style, as well as getting the information in. I knocked this out quite quickly and my boss was quite impressed, which was nice, and then asked me to do more and more bits of writing.

And then ASV got bought out by Sanctuary Records, which had all these associated metal artists – so you’d go into the canteen and Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden would be there, and they’d have Kerrang! TV on. We had a meeting interrupted because Robert Plant was in reception. It was very glamorous, quite fun – I loved it, and I got to meet some really interesting people.

But all this meant that later, still in the heyday of CD production, particularly in classical music, I was hired to do a lot of freelance writing. There was a lot of repackaging – essentially getting older recordings and repackaging them as ‘The Best of Poulenc’ or whoever it was – and new labels were being set up. So I was asked to churn out quite a lot of essays for them, and quite quickly built up a body of work. The hardest commission was when my daughter was only a couple of months old, when I was asked to do 17 liner notes in two and a half weeks, so I was a machine for that period. It was something like one essay a day. And obviously I was looking after a small child!

Then I started to get emails from various people – the BBC, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, and others: ‘We’ve noticed your writing, we like it, would you like to send me some examples.’ And it’s slowly built from there.

I would say I’m a generalist. I’m not someone who’s done a PhD in a specific area, I always treat myself as someone who’s not really an expert, but I will do the research when I’m writing a programme note, as thoroughly as possible, as is relevant for that programme note, but I’m always kind of standing on the shoulders of people who’ve done that in-depth research. But equally, I’m trying to bring my perspective, and the way I hear it and write about it, hopefully I can bring some joy to people’s listening experience. 

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And you got to write about new commissions as well, is that right?

JOANNA WYLD:

One that was really nice – it was a premiere performance – was Mark-Anthony Turnage’s ‘Owl Songs’ as a tribute to Oliver Knussen (1952–2018). It was a real privilege to write about that because I’d met Oliver Knussen a couple of times, an absolute gem of a man and composer. His music is just these crystalline jewels of orchestral beauty, and I’d recommend something like ‘Flourish with Fireworks’ (1988) to anyone who thinks contemporary music’s a bit alienating. So he mentored Mark-Anthony Turnage who I’ve also since interviewed, and Olly was known affectionately as Big Owl – particularly Mark referred to him in that affectionate way. So the Owl Songs are these wonderful tributes.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Are you adhering to house style with these things, or do they tend to leave you alone?

JOANNA WYLD:

There’s very little editorial interference, actually, which is lovely. And I’ve built up trust with a number of commissioners, which is great. What has changed in the style of writing for these sorts of things is it used to be much more academic, much closer to my university essays. The expectation would be that your audience would be aficionados – but it was a lot drier. Actually it’s much more fun now, because the emphasis is on something more inviting and accessible that could be read by anyone, and if you do something more technical, you just explain it in passing. You try and make it as enjoyable as possible to read and that has been fun because I can bring out my own personality a bit more, and feel freer to illuminate what’s exciting about the music.

I feel very strongly that we tend to present classical music as very polite, elegant and smooth, and it can be all of those things, but it can also be… terrifying, for example. Like with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, I get palpitations – it’s visceral, it’s filthy. Or Richard Strauss, which can be, to be blunt, very sexual – and I think people almost need permission to hear it in that way because they think classical is ‘all very nice’, and actually… he was a bit of a perv, you know? And if that sort of thing’s there, it’s pointless to not draw people towards that way of listening or bringing out the enjoyment of it.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Why do you think then that happened to classical music, that the politeness of it became paramount? Is it because of how it was taught, or presented?

JOANNA WYLD:

Every possible experience you have had is all there in classical music somewhere. These are very complex people writing it, and often that’s what I enjoy exploring – their personality, their quirks, their flaws, and the rest of it.

I mean, this is a huge topic – people have done PhDs on this – but in terms of how we receive it… the Victorians have a fair bit to answer for. You know, the idea of the Opera House: people had previously been there as an everyday experience, and then it became this hierarchy of ‘who sits where’, and then obviously with different genres, you have this shift – music that was contemporary becoming historical, and then becoming classical, so it’s no longer immediate. Whereas pop music is obviously reflecting people now. So with anything historical, you can end up with this sheen of respectability and this sense of it being a museum piece, something that you have to treat with reverence.

It’s really complicated but yes, definitely the way it’s taught, even the way it’s marketed… the way even people who love classical music sometimes talk about it… it can be quite reverential, and there are bits of it that are of course sublime. But there’s plenty else in there, and it’s almost just encouraging people to go and hear it.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So how do you strike a balance between musicology and biography when you’re writing these?

JOANNA WYLD:

There used to be more of an emphasis on musicology – perhaps the structure of a piece of music could go into a bit of detail – whereas now I tend to start with biography and history and set the scene. I try and give a bit of historical context and wherever possible bring out the interesting details about that composer that are relevant to that piece. And if possible, quotes – direct quotes are really interesting. If I can find them, if they’re reliable, just from letters or whatever, because that just tells you so much about them.

We were told at university: You mustn’t let the biography of a composer influence the way the music is interpreted too heavily. I think that’s fair, particularly from an academic perspective – that you are not there to try and tell a story through every single score. And if you’re trying to look at it on its own terms, musically, you do need to separate the two, but for a concert-going or a CD-listening experience, it brings the music to life, stops it being a museum piece. Because you realise these human beings were just as complicated as we are, and often just funny, or grumpy or whatever. Then I might go into some musical detail, and if I’ve got space, try and do a bit of a listening guide, try and draw out some highlights, some things to listen out for.

Occasionally I’ll do a deep dive, find something that isn’t widely known, or almost gives people permission to think of those composers in a slightly different way. For example, JS Bach’s ‘Musical Offering’ (1747). With Bach, he’s so revered we tend to deify him, and talk about him in reverential tones. But the story behind that piece is so fascinating. I did a lot of research from a non-classical perspective, like reading a bit of Gödel, Escher, Bach [by the US scientist Douglas Hofstadter, published 1979], and stuff about mathematical patterns. But with that piece, you also had family dynamics going on – his son [CPE Bach] was working for Frederick [the Great, King Frederick II of Prussia] who commissioned this piece, but they laid down the gauntlet in the most provocative way by saying, ‘Oh, improvise a fugue in six parts’ and no-one had ever really done that. He managed a three-part improvisation and then went away – and it was as though he had a fit of pique, producing this ridiculously vast response to this challenge, creating something out of this deliberately difficult and angular theme. And none of this that I included was new, but it was quite nice to bring out those aspects. Especially with someone like Bach who obviously had great faith and appears to be very holy… that composition came from a bit of anger and irritation.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Yes, bringing composers to life as human beings without overemphasising to the detriment of the work. I’m sure it’s changed in school-teaching now, back stories are brought up more. I had good music teachers at school, but I don’t ever remember being taught about these composers’ lives, which now feels really weird. Or even the wider history of the time.

JOANNA WYLD:

It’s like Beethoven was a young carer, effectively. His dad descended into alcoholism after his mother’s death, so he was caring for his siblings, which prevented him from staying in Vienna to study with Mozart, which he really wanted to do. Information like that is really humanising, especially as Beethoven was perhaps the first in the 19th century to be regarded as ‘in touch with the divine’, and really cast that long shadow.

I would probably say I’m not a musicologist like, say, Leah Broad [FLA 28], but I’d call myself a music historian. The history of it is fascinating, and it helps people to get closer to the music because they realise these were normal people who might have been incredibly gifted but also worked really hard. Again, Bach was one of those people, who said, Anyone who works as hard as me can do the same thing. Which is not entirely true, but nor was he sitting there on a cloud, you know, being a genius.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I mentioned this in the Leah Broad chat, about hearing Radio 3 say in passing about how Felix Mendelssohn essentially revived JS Bach’s music around 1830 – it had hardly been played for about eighty years after Bach’s death.

JOANNA WYLD:

It had really gone out of fashion, it’s sort of staggering. Although Mozart and Beethoven had studied Bach, and actually the sort of contrapuntal depth they learnt from him is one thing that elevates their music above the more lightweight stuff of the time. So his influence was still there at key moments, although in terms of performance it wasn’t until Mendelssohn revived it.

——

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Something else I discovered from your website: you’ve been a librettist. Can you tell me about your work with Robert Hugill?

JOANNA WYLD:

That was a wonderful opportunity. A friend put us in touch. It was called ‘The Gardeners’. Robert had read this article about a family of gardeners in the Middle East, tending war graves, and it was intergenerational. So he had this idea, it was his conception, of how the generations relate to each other, and the old man of the three generations could hear the dead. So there was that metaphysical aspect to it, and so we had a chorus of the dead, and the youngest is quite a rebellious character. All of this was fictionalised – this isn’t based on the article – and it was a chamber opera, so it’s not huge scale, but it unfolded as a sort of family drama. Ultimately, the old man dies, whereupon the youngest man inherits his ability to hear the dead. Meantime, you’ve got the women of the family trying to keep the peace. So it’s a family drama with a metaphysical aspect. We performed it a couple of times, which was amazing, firstly at the Conway Hall and then at the Garden Museum with a wonderful cast.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Is it about trying to find words that sound good as well as have meaning? When you’re writing something like that, does it become clear what doesn’t belong? Do you have a working method for something like that?

JOANNA WYLD:

I definitely think it helps that my Masters was in Composition. And I’ve set a lot of words myself. So I know the kind of thing I would set, and it’s not always the choice you might expect. It has to be something where the words lend themselves to musical treatment. Which often means there’s a rhythmic lilt to them – you’re thinking of the words rhythmically, but also making sure they don’t obstruct the music. So if it’s really overly polysyllabic and flowery, that’s going to get in the way, and it becomes about the words, not the music. But there’s also how the words sit next to each other – I remember reading a wonderful letter from Ted Hughes to Sylvia Plath about the choice of two words in one of her poems. It was two quite punchy words next to each other, and I think he suggested weighting them differently but also talking about them as if they were physical objects. I relate to that. So when I’m writing something like that, and I’m not saying it’s on that level, I try and think in terms of the weight of the words, and how they’ll then sit in someone’s mouth.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Because just as there’s a musicality in music itself, there’s a musicality in words too, so you’ve got to match the two up. Do you still write music yourself, as well?

JOANNA WYLD:

I’ve written a couple of songs with bands I’ve been in, I enjoyed that. I had a really lovely teacher at university, Robert Saxton, but you really have to pursue it, you have to be so obsessed with it, and I also realised I’m probably better at writing about music than writing music.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

What sort of music were you writing for the bands you’ve been in?

JOANNA WYLD:

One song started out as a sort of Hot Chip parody really, almost like a joke – and then I added some influences from LCD Soundsystem; it’s quite a fun track, which we once played at a wedding, and a conga formed, which was one of the biggest compliments.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

That’s brilliant.

JOANNA WYLD:

And then I’ve written a sort of cathartic song called ‘Prufrock’, where I drew on TS Eliot’s ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So you were singing these?

JOANNA WYLD:

Yeah. Another one was called ‘The Air’ which was my attempt at layering stuff together in a sort of Brian Wilson fashion.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And what were your bands called? Were you gigging?

JOANNA WYLD:

One was called Fake Teak, and we recorded ‘Prufrock’. It’s my brother’s band, named after the equipment that our dad had when we were growing up. That’s now evolved into something called Music Research Unit, which is a similar line-up, but more fluid and with new songs. We had our first rehearsal just yesterday! Then I’m in another band called Dawn of the Squid, and I don’t write for them, and they’re hard to describe, but they’re kind of… indie-folk, and there’s comedy in there.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Is this out there to hear?

JOANNA WYLD:

There’s a new Dawn of the Squid album, which I didn’t play on, I can’t take any credit, but that’s out. There’s quite a bit of Fake Teak on Spotify. I play synthesisers and flute in these groups, and to go back to what we were discussing earlier – about sounds not being strictly in tune – what I find lovely about some synthesisers is they feel much closer to acoustic instruments; they can go out of tune, and you can make unpleasant as well as pleasant noises on them. I play this instrument sometimes called an ARP Odyssey [analogue synthesiser introduced in 1972] and it can go out of tune on stage, it’s a real rarity, and it’s been used in loads of pop like Ultravox. But I have had gigs where it’s gone a bit out of tune, and in a weird way I kind of enjoyed that more than digital instruments where it’s got presets and everything’s tidy, because it feels much closer to my experience of other instruments.

—–

LAST: THE UNTHANKS: Diversions, Vol. 4: The Songs and Poems of Molly Drake (2017, RabbleRouser Music)

Extract: ‘What Can a Song Do to You?’

JOANNA WYLD:

I’m not a folk expert, I’m getting into it more, but like a lot of people, I came to this because I heard Unthanks do the ‘Magpie’ song on Detectorists. Then I went to a concert, locally, on the strength of that, and that’s where they performed some of these Molly Drake songs. I loved the whole concert – one of my prevailing memories of it is my crying my contact lens out during one of the Molly Drake songs, and just having to sit there with it in my palm, kind of half-blind.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

These songs are amazing to hear because we know so much, or at least we think we do, about Nick Drake’s life, but obviously the Molly Drake archive hasn’t been pored over by scholars too much. I think most of these songs are from the Fifties, and the Unthanks have covered them, apparently, because they wanted to make better quality recordings. And the Molly Drake versions are out there too. But there’s something about these songs that are both public creativity – as in the Drake family being aware of these songs – and private creativity too as it wasn’t out in the public domain for years. And you keep having to remind yourself that these songs were written before Nick Drake got into music himself, not afterwards. 

JOANNA WYLD:

Yes, so many women composers are talked of in relation to their male relative, but you’re right that she was doing this first. It clearly influenced Nick Drake, and the almost painful shyness is a clear link, so it illuminates his music, which I also love, but I think on its own terms Molly’s music is phenomenal and yet, incredible that she was so shy that I think her husband bought her a reel-to-reel and set her up in a room on her own with it. He recognised her talent so there was this idea of ‘Let’s get this down for posterity’, but there was no concept in her mind that anyone would ever hear it, which seems really alien to us now, but there’s a real beauty to that.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I think there can be a pressure when you’re writing something that you know is going to be for public consumption in some way. But I found a great Rachel Unthank quote:

‘Her work shares her son’s dark introspection, but in Molly we get a clearer sense of how those who understand depths of despair can do so only by understanding happiness and joy too. Through Molly’s work, we see the soulful, enigmatic lonesomeness as a person who is also a member of a loving and fun-loving family.’

I think that’s really important because Nick Drake – and his work – tends to be defined by what happened to him, and not all of him and his work is like that. I mean, the Molly song that feels like it could have been written in response to his early death – ‘Do You Ever Remember?’ – was written much earlier.

JOANNA WYLD:

You mentioned family, but obviously on the Unthanks recording, you’ve also got Gabrielle Drake reciting the poetry. I went to the Nick Drake Prom, with the Unthanks performing with Gabrielle Drake, which was phenomenally moving – and brave of her as well, I thought. And it’s a rich combination to listen to – you’ve got the sugared almond sound of the Unthanks’ voices, and the woodier timbre of her delivery. The whole thing really cuts to your heart, similar to Nick Drake, but it’s even less crowded in metaphor, it cuts to the heart with a deceptive simplicity. The first track, ‘What Can a Song Do to You?’, has one of those melodies that feels like it’s always existed, and then this tremendous bit of poetry. I really admire people who can pick and use very few words to convey something. I was lucky enough to interview Michael Morpurgo many years ago, and he blew my mind in terms of how to write. He used to say, ‘We don’t need to teach kids lots of florid words, but to be direct.’ That lyrical and nuanced but straightforward vocabulary can be more powerful and it’s something I aspire to, [but] I don’t always find it easy.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I feel the same way. As an editor and sometime writer, I find that writing a simple sentence is actually quite hard.

JOANNA WYLD:

The poem I was going to mention at the end of ‘What Can a Song Do to You?’: ‘Does it remind you of a time when you were sad? (So in other words, why? Why is this person crying?) Does it remind you of the time when you were sad? Ah, no. But it reminds me of a time when I could be. It reminds me of a time when I could be…

And I sort of think that’s… mindblowing.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

That particular song has been going around my head for the last few days. Going back to what you were saying with Detectorists making you aware of Unthanks, film and TV does seem to be a major way for people to connect with people now. I sometimes look at the streaming stats for tracks at random, wonder how that’s become the biggest thing, and it’s nearly always some film or TV programme I wasn’t aware of.

JOANNA WYLD:

I guess it’s a route in. I recognise this with classical music as well – I’m lucky enough to have grown up with enough that I’ve absorbed bits and learned about it, done my degrees in it. If I hadn’t done that, that might be my way in as well. And as I don’t have that background with folk song – I like the genre in a broad sense, but I wouldn’t know where to start looking. There’s too much out there, and there are playlists but they can be a bit too rambling.

——

ANYTHING: THE CARDINALL’S MUSICK / ANDREW CARWOOD / DAVID SKINNER: Cornysh, Turges, Prentes: Latin Church Music (1997, Gaudeamus/ASV Records)

Extract: William Cornysh: ‘Salve Regina’

JOANNA WYLD:

This ties a few things together. This is the William Cornysh recording of ‘Salve Regina’, which is my favourite work on that album, but it’s on the Gaudeamus label which I mentioned earlier. I worked with some of the people on that label, but I also know about this repertoire because I was lucky enough at university to study early music with David Skinner, who’s one of the two founders of The Cardinall’s Musick [the other being Andrew Carwood]. They’ve since gone in different directions and David now conducts [a consort] called Alamire. So this is going back a bit, but it was through that university experience that I got to hear this. It’s funny – we were talking about church music earlier but this is English Catholic music of the Tudor era and it’s sad to me that the Catholic Church in this country doesn’t have that kind of choral tradition because we’ve got these riches but for some reason it’s not performed in that church context very often, but nor is it often sung in the concert hall either. Slightly later you get Thomas Tallis and William Byrd, in the Elizbaethan era, that gets mentioned a bit more. But for some reason the Eton Choir Book doesn’t get as much attention and I think it deserves it, so I thought it might be quite fun to bring that in. Because particularly with the Cornysh ‘Salve Regina’, it’s incredible.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

In fact, I’ve got a quote from David Skinner here, from the 1990s: Henry VIII had destroyed most of the musical manuscripts and he says ‘there are literally only two of the choir books I worked from when originally there would have been hundreds.’

JOANNA WYLD:

Yes, Lambeth is the other one, I think?

JUSTIN LEWIS:

He mentions the Eton Choir Book, and the other was Caius?

JOANNA WYLD:

I will have to check my facts because the history of this area is so complex!

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I’m glad you said that! I merely skimmed this, and it felt quite complicated!

JOANNA WYLD:

Really complicated, and I’m sure some of the complexities of how it was written have gone out of the window for me… I learned them a long time ago. I do, very geekily, have a facsimile copy of the Eton Choir Book. I occasionally try and follow along, and it’s quite tricky to follow because instead of it being arranged in score, you’ve got the four parts written separately.

But when I heard the ‘Salve Regina’ at university, it stuck out for me. It’s incredibly beautiful, it takes a bit of time to get into the language and it’s interesting to me that a lot of people who love early music and love contemporary music overlap because early music predates a lot of ‘the rules’ that dominate so much of Western music. With this piece, it’s like you’re walking through a cathedral, meandering, just wandering, but then you get these cadences or these chords, very vivid moments, that feel like light coming through stained glass. And it’s quite a long piece, but right at the end, it just builds and builds up to that high note, which then drops down, and then you have these glorious last two chords. At that point, it’s almost like you’re at the rose window… Even if you’re not religious, music does reflect every facet of who we are, and spirituality is one facet of who we are as human beings. So it’s powerful even if we don’t specifically believe in something. It’s a sense of time travel. It takes you out of yourself and takes you back, but it also kind of elevates as well.

———–

JOANNA WYLD:

At school, I don’t recall learning much pop at all. It wasn’t that I wasn’t exposed to it, but in terms of my actual education, the emphasis was on the history of Western music, classical and symphonic music and so on. My daughter did have to analyse pop – I remember Fleetwood Mac’s ‘The Chain’ being one example. I’ve been a primary school teacher, and I do remember teaching some Stevie Wonder because any excuse, I absolutely love Stevie Wonder, but it was Black History Month and so I brought in his songs about social history, and they all knew ‘Happy Birthday’ but we could talk about how that brought in Martin Luther King Day, which was a lovely way of giving the pupils a sense of the impact music can have.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Interesting that they knew the song, it’s not one of his you hear that often now.

JOANNA WYLD:

They all knew the chorus, when I sang that bit, they knew that, but they didn’t know the verses or the lyrics so they just thought of it as generic. It’s not my favourite Stevie song – I’ve got so many – but it’s an example of how powerful music can be.

———

You can find out more about Joanna, and her work, at her website, Notes Upon Notes: https://www.notes-upon-notes.com

You can follow her on Bluesky at @joannawyld.bsky.social.

Also, find out more about Dawn of the Squid at their website: https://dawnofthesquid.co.uk

—–

FLA PLAYLIST 32

Joanna Wyld

For the time being, this site and project uses Spotify for the conversation playlists, but obviously I disapprove that Spotify doesn’t pay artists and composers properly, and other streaming platforms are available, as are sites to buy downloads and buy recordings. For consistency, you can also listen to the selections via YouTube (where available), and links are provided in each case, below.)

Thanks to Tune My Music, you can also transfer this playlist to the platform or site of your choice by using this link: https://www.tunemymusic.com/share/QWjXV28T8E

Track 1:

THE BEATLES: ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XT4pwRi2JmY&list=RDXT4pwRi2JmY&start_radio=1

Track 2:

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE: ‘Oxygène, Part IV’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PycXs9LpEM&list=RD_PycXs9LpEM&start_radio=1

Track 3:

ST GILES, CRIPPLEGATE BELL RINGING TEAM: ‘Cambridge Surprise Maximus’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8rwhJHt9Ds&list=RDo8rwhJHt9Ds&start_radio=1

Track 4:

JONATHAN HARVEY: ‘Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0T-H-fVlHE0&list=RD0T-H-fVlHE0&start_radio=1

Track 5:

BJÖRK: ‘Overture’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6k4xT0qjUW4&list=RD6k4xT0qjUW4&start_radio=1

Track 6:

BJÖRK: ‘New World’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNma-h_urvs&list=RDeNma-h_urvs&start_radio=1

Track 7:

LEONARD BERNSTEIN: ‘On the Waterfront Suite’

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Marin Alsop:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4isx_tGYwM&list=RDt4isx_tGYwM&start_radio=1

Track 8:

OLIVIER MESSIAEN: ‘Le merle noir’:

Emmanuel Pahud, Eric Le Sage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT8MQpg7oTo&list=RDhT8MQpg7oTo&start_radio=1

Track 9:

RICHARD STRAUSS: ‘4 Letzte Lieder [Four Last Songs], TrV 296: No. 3: Beim Schlafengehen’:

Gundula Janowitz, Berliner Philharmoniker, Herbert von Karajan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5n0DqFlpMY&list=RDt5n0DqFlpMY&start_radio=1

Track 10:

QUEEN: ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG16sdjLtc0&list=RDxG16sdjLtc0&start_radio=1

Track 11:

LOUIS COLE, METROPOLE ORKEST, JULES BUCKLEY: ‘Shallow Laughter: Bitches – orchestral version’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEmMAG4C1BE&list=RDbEmMAG4C1BE&start_radio=1

Track 12:

AARON COPLAND: ’12 Poems of Emily Dickinson: No. 10: I’ve Heard An Organ Talk Sometimes’:

Susan Chilcott, Iain Burnside:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvKLlCf2TWE&list=RDSvKLlCf2TWE&start_radio=1

Track 13:

OLIVER KNUSSEN: ‘Flourish with Fireworks, op. 22: Tempo giusto e vigoroso – Molto vivace’:

London Sinfonietta:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLkTfXPC-TU&list=RDwLkTfXPC-TU&start_radio=1

Track 14:

IGOR STRAVINSKY: ‘The Rite of Spring, Part 1: V. Games of the Rival Tribes’:

Seiji Ozawa, Chicago Symphony Orchestra:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiAr76Qs8WY&list=RDXiAr76Qs8WY&start_radio=1

Track 15:

IGOR STRAVINSKY: ‘The Rite of Spring, Part 1: VI. Procession of the Sage’:

Seiji Ozawa, Chicago Symphony Orchestra:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvBog5Tej2I&list=PL-XNw6p4EDBv7-H-z2Vo_c3sB3rvIxt7-&index=6

Track 16:

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH: ‘Musical Offering, BWV 1079: Ricercar a 6 – Clavecin’:

Pierre Hantaï:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K07rF5xOvQ 

Track 17:

FAKE TEAK: ‘Prufrock’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5-1prkhHjU&list=RDL5-1prkhHjU&start_radio=1

Track 18:

THE UNTHANKS: ‘What Can A Song Do to You?’

[Poem read by Gabrielle Drake]:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzqb_78LUkI&list=RDJzqb_78LUkI&start_radio=1

Track 19:

WILLIAM CORNYSH: ‘Salve Regina’:

The Cardinall’s Musick, Andrew Carwood, David Skinner:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQprxgtbk4E&list=RDpQprxgtbk4E&start_radio=1

Track 20:

STEVIE WONDER: ‘Happier Than the Morning Sun’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4PcSOLtf-U&list=RDS4PcSOLtf-U&start_radio=1

FLA 17: Bernard Hughes (11/06/2023)

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Born in London, the composer and educator Bernard Hughes studied Music at St Catherine’s College, Oxford during the 1990s, where he also was in the Oxford Revue with amongst others, a young Ben Willbond. After graduating, Bernard studied composition at Goldsmiths College and was awarded his PhD by the University of London in 2009. As well as his work as a composer, he is Composer-in-Residence at St Paul’s Girls’ School in London.

 

Although Bernard is probably now most renowned for his work in choral music – I particularly have enjoyed the Precious Things collection released by Dauphin in 2022, with the Epiphoni Consort – much of his canon of piano works has been recorded and newly issued by the soloist Matthew Mills, on a CD called Bagatelles.

 

To coincide with the release of Bagatelles, Bernard and I had an exhilarating and fascinating conversation one morning in April 2023 to discuss that, his long association with the BBC Singers, his formative years in London and Berlin, and some of his favourite recordings, as well as his first, last and anything selections. We hope you enjoy this first instalment of First Last Anything’s second series. 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

When I was a child, my dad conducted the choir at the Catholic Church at the end of our road. So I would be in the organ loft a lot, hearing him conducting and singing various pieces, a couple of which in particular, as an adult, I can think: Yes, my judgement as a five-year-old was spot on. They were Mozart’s ‘Ave verum corpus’, a very late a cappella piece [1791, the year of Mozart’s death], and a brilliant anthem by Henry Purcell, ‘Rejoice in the Lord, alway’ [c. 1683–85].

 

My dad had trained as a singer, and had been offered a contract with what became the English National Opera. He didn’t pursue the singing career, but he had a very, very fine voice, and as he conducted, he would sing the bass line of the hymn. I think that’s been very influential on my understanding of harmony – hearing the whole thing but particularly him coming through on the bass line.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I remember my own father doing that. He had a record with that Purcell anthem on it, by the way. He loved lots of different types of music, but he liked church music very much and he used to harmonise a bass part underneath a piece of music quite often.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

I think that’s a useful music skill – see what the bassline is going to do, that’s always been a thing I can hear. My son is extraordinary, he has perfect pitch, and he can just play chords because he’s hearing those pitches. Whereas I’m working out the bassline in abstract terms from the degrees of the scale, of the qualities, as opposed to specifically D flat, you know. Having perfect pitch is a two-edged sword. It’s not an unalloyed blessing in that sense. It makes me work a bit harder, because I don’t listen and think, That’s an F.

 

 

—

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

I’m absolutely not a religious person, but it’s worth mentioning something about church music at that time. In the 1960s, the Second Vatican Council had opened up and got rid of the Latin mass and the mass in the local language, and this applied to music as well: there was a vacancy, if you like, in the 1970s for new Catholic and liturgical music in English. So there was a new generation of composers around – in fact, there was someone writing this stuff who my dad had worked with in that choir.

 

I didn’t know that a lot of what I was hearing was quite new. I’ve pieced it together retrospectively. The harmonies are kind of modal, and there are elements of dissonance. So the Catholic Church is not the most progressive organisation, but if it was progressive in any sense, it was in its approach to music in the 70s and 80s.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

That’s really interesting, piecing it together later, and connecting these things. Back in the day, I was trying to work out where I belonged in listening to classical music. I was in a state comprehensive, and we were lucky to have a music department, we had quite a good school orchestra, which I was in, but nothing quite felt fully connected up or explained. Also, mine was the last but one year of O level before they changed to GCSE. It’s really weird it modernised slightly for the GCSE because it was under a Conservative government. 

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

They brought in this three-part of Listen Perform Compose.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Right. There was no composing when I did O level.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

Exactly. I was the first year of GCSE (1988), and obviously that suited me down to the ground in terms of writing music. But a generation of music teachers had got well established in their careers without ever teaching composition – and suddenly it was one-third of the GCSE course. Subsequently, when I did A level music, it was an option, you could do it as an option – and then from 2000 it became compulsory. So again, A level students who would previously have got A level without doing a note of composing, found it a compulsory part of the course.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It makes me smile when people are a few years younger and did GCSE rather than O level: they’ll say, ‘Oh well, of course we studied The Works by Queen’, whereas for us, there was no pop; there was barely acknowledgement that jazz existed.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

When I was teaching GCSE Music around 2008, they introduced a Britpop option for teaching as a history topic. And I was having to explain – in 2008! – the Labour government of 1997, because by 2008 the people’s perception of Tony Blair, for example, was very different.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I always felt when I was at school, the teachers were good but there didn’t seem to be so much explanation of context and history, why some of these pieces came to be, what caused them.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

My degree was quite history-based, and my teaching now has that dimension: ‘What was happening in the wider world at this time?’ These things didn’t happen in a vacuum. And as a school music teacher, you can’t shrug off pop music – and in fact I’ve picked up a lot of things over the years from my students. One lent me a cassette of the second Ben Folds Five album, Whatever and Ever Amen. I looked at the cover and thought, Oh god it’s a boy band, this is gonna be really awkward. But obviously I fell in love with it within the first two bars [of ‘One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces’], it’s got these brilliant openings. And Ben Folds has gone on to be one of my absolute favourites.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I find it so interesting he was a drummer originally.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

Yeah, he had that autobiography out during lockdown [A Dream About Lightning Bugs]. A very interesting character, extraordinary musician and pianist. But I came to him through a recommendation from a student. I like to keep an open mind. That’s how you find things.

 

 

—

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

I got started on piano lessons when I was about five or six. This really cranky old machine, which the convent round the corner were getting rid of, but it got me started. And then, when I was about seven, there were these blank manuscript sheets which I would start writing on, without anyone suggesting to me that I should. Quite odd, because they were four-line staves rather than five – they were used for chants. So I would add in a fifth line with a ruler, and start writing music. I would write a key signature where I did a mixture of sharps and flats within the key signature. And my dad would say, ‘You’re not allowed to do that!’ Although I found out later that somebody like Bartók would write an F sharp next to an E flat. So I was writing music with not much idea of how it sounded, before knowing what a composer was, or that I should be a composer.

 

When I was about eight or nine, we had a cassette player in the car for the first time. We got four cassettes from WHSmiths, which went round and round for the next ten years:

Buddy Holly’s Greatest Hits, an album called Elvis Sings Leiber and Stoller, a Louis Armstrong tape, and this cassette of Revolver by The Beatles… in an unusual order.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yeah, they often rejigged the track listings for the cassettes, so that side one and two had roughly equal running times.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

For me, to this day, Revolver should begin with ‘Good Day Sunshine’, as opposed to ‘Taxman’, because that was the first song on that cassette copy. Although it still finished with ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’.

 

 

[NB: Compare the cassette running order of Revolver, with its LP original:

 

CASSETTE                                                    LP      

 

Side One:                                                        Side One:

Good Day Sunshine                                   Taxman

And Your Bird Can Sing                           Eleanor Rigby

Doctor Robert                                             I’m Only Sleeping

I Want to Tell You                                       Love You To

Taxman                                                          Here, There and Everywhere

I’m Only Sleeping                                       Yellow Submarine

Yellow Submarine                                       She Said She Said

 

Side Two:                                                       Side Two:

Eleanor Rigby                                              Good Day Sunshine

Here, There and Everywhere                   And Your Bird Can Sing

For No One                                                  For No One

Got to Get You Into My Life                  Doctor Robert

Love You To                                                 I Want to Tell You

She Said She Said                                        Got to Get You Into My Life

Tomorrow Never Knows                         Tomorrow Never Knows

 —-

FIRST: LONDON PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA: Favourites of the London Philharmonic (Music for Pleasure, 1980)

Excerpt: Litolff: ‘Concerto Symphonique No 4 in D minor: II. Scherzo’

BERNARD HUGHES

My aunty Celia, my mum’s sister, gave me this compilation cassette and I found it again when my parents cleared out their house. I just played this over and over again, found it very inspiring. It’s hard to tell now whether I love them because they’re ingrained on me – many of them stand up as really great pieces.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Long deleted, I think, but I found it on Discogs. The photograph is not a very good reproduction of the cover and inlay but I managed to squint at the liner notes, and it seems it was compiled based on melodic strength. And all 19th century – I think the Weber is the earliest, about 1820. 

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

Yes, clearly it’s a collection of lollipops: here’s some fun things to get you into music.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Compilations can be very helpful, especially when you’re just starting to get into something.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

And if you said to the compiler to this, ‘There’s a child out there who’s gonna hear this compilation and it’s gonna change their life…’, they’d be delighted. I had trouble tracking down some tracks for years.

 

But the one in particular that grabbed me then was by this guy called Henry Charles Litolff (1818–91), who’s completely obscure now. It’s called ‘Concerto symphonique: Scherzo’. It had been huge in the 1940s – it’s about five minutes long, so I think it fitted well on to records in the early days of the very short 78rpm records. On this compilation it’s played by Peter Katin (1930–2015). I think the radio used to play it when it was ‘Well, we’re slightly early for the news’, you know. For whatever reason, it’s not even one piece, but just one movement of one piece. And it never gets played as a piece anymore – if I’d known it had been programmed for a concert in the UK in the last 30 years, I’d have dropped everything to be there.

 

I absolutely love it, it’s full of energy, it’s fun, and one bit suddenly goes very simple: Ding. Ding. Ding. I remember thinking at that young age, ‘I could play that bit’, but recently I found a YouTube film where it scrolls through the sheet music and even ‘the easy bit’ is phenomenally hard. But it made me specifically think: I want to grow up and be able to play that piece. And I have never got anywhere remotely close to it.

—

FIRST (Part II): PRINCE AND THE REVOLUTION: Purple Rain (Warner Bros, 1984)

Excerpt: ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Fast forward a few years, and you first hear this. Purple Rain. Tell me about this.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

This would have been ’85 or so. We were living in what was then West Germany [of which more, later]. My friend Patrick got the tape of it first. And I had no concept of it at the time, because we still had Elvis and Buddy Holly in the car, so I had no idea if it was old or just a collection like my London Philharmonic cassette. But we listened to this album over and over in his parents’ house.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

In the UK, it felt – with ‘When Doves Cry’ – that he became famous very suddenly. ‘1999’ had made the charts before that, but not particularly high (#25, early 1983), and then with Purple Rain, he became very famous. Whereas in America, he’d done it more incrementally – it was his sixth album, and each one had made him that bit more prominent. It felt weird that there was a film behind it, that felt massive, although admittedly it’s not a great film. Apart from the performances… there’s that really long version of ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ (on the 12” single) which they edited down for the LP.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

They had to go back and re-record a lot of that live footage, because it wasn’t quite right when they recorded it. And bits of it are from the day they launched it, when they went to the club.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, the last three songs on the album: ‘I Would Die 4 U’, ‘Baby I’m a Star’ and ‘Purple Rain’ itself. Before I ever saw the film, I thought, ‘Why is there applause at the end of “Baby I’m a Star”?’ And of course it was because they recorded those three songs live on the same day.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

It does have an incredible energy. When the deluxe release of it came out, with most of the stuff they had cut, I think they had been right to. Except for the 10-minute version of ‘Computer Blue’ which is brilliant – the version on the original LP is horribly edited, there’s a real clunky jumpcut. But of course that editorial sense was what he lost later, in the 90s… that sense of quality control – when he just released everything that came into his head. Although lately, through a friend who lent me the CD, I have come round to Chaos and Disorder.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Oh yes, the last contractual obligation for Warners (1996), so it was seen as a ‘cupboard’s nearly bare’ record.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

I’d always written it off as that, but he’s got together with his pals and they just absolutely jam. It’s brilliant.

 

But going back to Purple Rain, and listening to that over and over again… When I went away to university, I knew far less music than any of my students do now, or than my son does now. I knew a small amount, but I knew it really, really well. And I’m not sure now whether people listen so heavily to something: you listen to something, then it’s ‘Let’s move on to something else, what’s next?’

 

 

—

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So how did you develop your composing into a career?

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

I was just always writing. When I was about 15, the teacher at school got me to write the incidental music for a school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And I had a composition teacher, but I didn’t really meet any other composers my age. I didn’t know much about contemporary music. At university, I didn’t really take it very seriously, I got a third in the composition paper in my finals because I was doing comedy stuff with the Oxford Revue.

 

But when I did a Masters in London and started taking it more seriously. If at any stage I’d stopped, nobody would particularly [have noticed]. You know, lots of people write music and then don’t anymore. I think I just never stopped.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s interesting you’re most associated, or at least I associate you, with choral music. But it wasn’t what you were composing early on, is that right?

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

Having said that my dad was a singer, I was very sniffy about people singing. I never sang in a choir myself, or wanted to sing, and so I had no interest in the big choral scene around the chapel choirs of Oxford. But then, very late, I accidentally got into it. In about 2002, my late twenties, I wrote and sent in a piece for a BBC Singers workshop. That led to a commission from them, which led to another workshop and so on.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

What was that first commission for them?

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

There was this big contemporary music festival, the Huddersfield Festival in 2003, and I wrote this very ambitious piece based on 150 aphorisms. I spent ages researching and getting permission for these aphorisms, everything from Francois de La Rochefoucauld right up to Spike Milligan and Jeanette Winterson. This massive 15-minute tapestry only ever had one performance, but the next workshop with the BBC Singers led to the idea of a piece called ‘The Death of Balder’. It was this Norse myth from a book of translations which I inherited from my godfather.

 

I proposed this piece as five to seven minutes but it became clear it was more like 25 minutes. This big choral piece, and in fact, it’s had quite a lot of outings, considering new pieces often get done once and never again. But this one did, and it ended up as the backbone of the first of my albums, I Am the Song.

 

This was 2006, 2007 – and from there I became a choral composer. Once I started doing it, I realised I loved doing this, working with choirs and the sounds they make. It was something I could do. I could sometimes feel with an instrumental piece that I didn’t know where to start or what to write, but I’ve never really been stuck on a choral piece.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

What’s your starting point, then, with a choral piece?

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

I often go for a little walk before I start, just hear them in the abstract. I get away from the keyboard as quickly as I can and on to the computer. Writing for a choir, you don’t want to be too influenced by what you happen to be able to play on a piano. When you’re singing, you can have one low note down there, and one high note up there. You don’t have to be able to play it.

 

Also, I collect texts… I’ll skim books of poetry, looking for texts. One thing I do with text, almost a kind of trademark, is I use a lot of changeable time signatures which will often go with the rhythm of the words – and often the rhythm of words is uneven. On my Precious Things album of choral music (2022), there’s a piece called ‘Psalm 56’, which goes, ‘My enemies will daily swallow me up’ – that’s an example of letting the text actually drive the rhythm, rather than imposing an artificial rhythm on it. Or on the BBC album, ‘The Winter It is Past’, which is a Robert Burns poem. It is strictly metric, but I put it into 5/4, which can sound quite jagged and uneven, but when you’re dealing with text, you wouldn’t say that sounds odd or out of kilter.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

The BBC Singers have been much in the news this year. Do you think everyone understands the full extent of why these cuts made by the BBC on their Singers and also their Orchestras need to be taken seriously?

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

When the news came out, I thought, This is terrible news for me in my niche – but will it have cut through to people who aren’t in this world? And it has done – all this amazing work the Singers have been doing for years is now being publicised. They’ve not been doing anything different [since March], but now they’re out there tweeting about it, they’re getting some coverage.

 

There’s a 50/50 gender split in their commissions. I don’t know this for sure, but over the past three years, I think the BBC Singers, as a group, has performed more music by women composers than any other group in the world. They do a concert every Friday, and 50% of every concert will be by women composers. But then they’ve been doing that anyway; they’ve just not had the recognition for it.

 

So some of it made a splash and it needed to. It was partly people like me saying ‘The BBC Singers need to be saved’, because that’s my world, devastating for people within it. And it was partly people saying, ‘If we don’t put our foot down or do something now, one thing after another will go, like the orchestras, until there’s nothing left.’

 

I started out in a workshop with the BBC Singers, which led to commissions, having a full album by them in 2016, then in 2020 there was a portrait concert that was 75% my music, and that culminating in a Proms commission in 2021. I am a shining example of that process working well, and closing the BBC Singers means that no-one else follows that path.

 

And even for people who aren’t looking to follow that path: they do workshops with undergraduates where they sing undergraduates’ music and workshop it. And if you’re an undergraduate who’s got no plans to go on and become a composer, you’ve had your piece sung by the BBC Singers, you’ve got a record of that piece – that’s incredible, and the idea that would be taken away from future generations is awful. So while I know a lot of the Singers personally, I’m friendly with them, in a broader context, culturally, this is something that the BBC should be shouting about proudly, and not [hiding it] shamefully.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

While it’s not just the BBC’s responsibility to keep something like this alive, I do think one of the roles of the BBC is to do what nobody else would do.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

Exactly, yeah.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And they have less money than they used to, and we know why that is!

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

That is full stop the fault of Nadine Dorries, who froze the licence fee, when they put the World Service on to the licence fee, when it used to be paid by the Foreign Office, when they made all the licence fees for the over-75s free… All of those things. Those are all governmental decisions that the BBC have had to deal with.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Radio still tries but I find television has basically given up on the arts in general, and I’m really struck by how you mostly only really get music coverage on television now when it’s a competition, when there’s a competitive element.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

There’s a British classical music writer, Andrew Mellor, who now lives in Denmark. And when the BBC Singers story appeared, he wrote a piece for Classical Music, in which he said that in Denmark, there’s an equivalent of the BBC Singers, the Danish Radio Vocal Ensemble. They have a slot, every weekday, three minutes before the six o’clock news, [called Song for the Day] where they’ll sing something, like a traditional Danish folk song, recorded and filmed. So everybody in Denmark is aware of their existence and of what they do and what they sound like. Whereas here, recently, lots of cultured and educated people have said to me, ‘I didn’t really know who the BBC Singers were or what they did.’

At the moment, the jury’s out on the ultimate decision, but I owe my career as a choral composer, that I am one at all, to the BBC Singers, to their current producer Jonathan Manners, and the producer who originally took a punt on me, Michael Emery, and who gave The Death of Balder a chance. So I’m really exercised about this, and really want it to be resolved, not just for me, but for the wider ecosystem.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So it’s not just a question of money.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

No, it’s not, it’s a lack of awareness of what they do – if they got rid of them, no-one would really notice. The BBC head of music who made the decision comes from a pop background – not in itself a problem, but they have zero understanding of what the singers do, presumably sees them as a bunch of old fuddy-duddies in suits singing old music, whereas they do a phenomenal range of stuff, from the very old to the contemporary. But I think on their part, it was ignorance of a) what the singers do, and b) what the singers mean to people.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Absolutely. My question was more a general one about cuts, in that it seems to me music coverage is now events-led. So they’ll do the Proms, they’ll do Glastonbury, and very well, but there’s barely any regular music series on television now. Later’s about the only thing left, and that isn’t year-round. Certainly very little serious music.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

Although, like you say, there is a stronger argument for there being classical programming than pop music because other people aren’t putting out classical concerts and that’s what they should be doing.

—- 

 

ANYTHING: ANNA MEREDITH: Varmints (Moshi Moshi, 2016)

Extract: ‘Nautilus’

BERNARD HUGHES

I had been aware of Anna Meredith, a very successful Scottish classical composer, who had written a piece for First Night of the Proms. And then about five or six years ago now, she suddenly brought out this hybrid of dance, electronic, classical and rock music.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It really does defy categorisation.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

Absolutely. My son and I have this category of music we call ‘love at first sight music’. Things that, within a few bars, you just know. There’s a few other things like that: the first Scissor Sisters album, Ben Folds, and also my other great enthusiasm, The Divine Comedy, which I loved within five bars. And it’s true of this too: Anna Meredith’s Varmints. I thought: ‘This is where it’s at.’

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So was this the opening track, ‘Nautilus’? I think I either first heard it on Radio 3 or 6Music, because both stations made a point of championing it.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

It was ‘Nautilus’, yeah. She’d actually introduced that piece about two years before, although I hadn’t heard it then, but it was an incredible statement of intent. You think you know what the pulse is – and then halfway through, the drums kick in.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Oh yes!

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

And it’s a completely different pulse. Astonishing and it answers a question I’d always had which is: ‘Could a classical musician do pop?’ You get certain crossovers the other way, but this shows her classical thinking: ‘What kind of polyrhythm can I pull out of this?’ And yet it still sounds like dance music. It’s got an extraordinary opening.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I saw Frank Skinner live a couple of years ago and he came on to that intro.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

There’s a phenomenon in pop music where intros have got shorter. They cut to the vocals quicker, and now it’s not 25 seconds, or 20, it’s now 5 seconds. And ‘Nautilus’ starts with the same chord for about a minute before anything else happens, it’s like: ‘This is my territory, and if you don’t like it, go away, because this is what it is.’ It’s an amazing courageous statement of intent which I just love.

 

On the same album, ‘The Vapours’, which I love [JL agreement], and which partly inspired a piece I wrote for my school orchestra concert band called ‘Gooseberry Fool’ which we released as a charity single. We meant it to have the same joyous kind of energy.

 

I took my son to a live concert, with orchestra, of Varmints, and it was one of those nights, which you don’t often get from classical music, where we walked out really buzzing from it. And her next album, Fibs (2019), again has some beautiful, wonderful, extraordinary songs on it. So in terms of not getting stuck in my ways, there’s something. Sometimes I hear people and I think, ‘That’s great, but that’s the kind of thing I could do.’ I couldn’t do Anna Meredith’s stuff – I love it, and I couldn’t do it.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I really need to see her live.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

I was lucky to be at the launch concert of Fibs. The band are phenomenally tight, because there are all these time signature changes and counterrhythms and polyrhythms. It’s virtuoso stuff. She plays the clarinet and bashes her drum… and there’s one brilliant bit, in ‘The Vapours’ where it’s in 7/4, so she bangs her drum and she’s on the beat, and then when it goes to the next bar, she’s suddenly off the beat. So she’s just doing a semi-beat, but it becomes the off-beat and then it gets back on the beat. It’s a mind-blowing trick.

LAST: BJARTE EIKE / BAROKKSOLISTENE: The Alehouse Sessions (Rubicon Classics, 2017)

Extract: ‘I Drew My Ship’

JUSTIN LEWIS

And while we’re on the subject of defying categorisation, that could be said about another of your selections – The Alehouse Sessions.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

I’ve never been a fan of what you might call folk music. The younger me might have turned my nose up at this, but I heard this first during one of those lovely Radio 3 mixtapes they play from 7 to 7.30 before their evening concerts. So I went and looked this up afterwards, and it was this Purcell overture – not actually the track I’ve specified, but I got the whole album. It’s not only a brilliant fresh way of looking at music, mixing folk songs with more classical material, like Henry Purcell, but it’s also a nod to the fact that Purcell would have been in the ‘proper’ theatre, and had his posh performance, and then would have gone to the bar and played his popular stuff.

 

I find ‘I Drew My Ship’ just unbelievably moving. First of all, it’s so bare. Maybe it’s a young man thing to throw everything, bells and whistles, at a piece of music, but as I get older… [I love] the sheer simplicity of that beginning, with just those harmonics on the strings and then about four-fifths of the way through the playing stops and there are all these singers who are not trained singers, they’re just the instrumentalists who happen to be singing. It’s that untrained dimension that’s so captivated, so touching.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s very striking and with the vocals, there’s this interesting way of using the voices that are off-mic sometimes.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

I haven’t seen them live yet, but they apparently perform it like a kind of happening or jam session. They wander around, singing from whenever they are. I believe they don’t particularly plan what they’re going to do in what order. It’s just very freestyle. And Bjarte, the violinist leader of the group, is brilliant.

 

I did an arrangement of this, actually, for my choir at school, which we’re doing at the moment. It works really well for unaccompanied voices – very different from that recording.

 

As a musician, studying and working in music for 35 years, and still having an enthusiasm for it, I can still get home from my job teaching music, and find exciting new music that I like. [I never want to lose that feeling. ‘I Drew My Ship’ can reduce me to tears, quite, quite easily – and I’m not someone who weeps very often.

 

—-

BERNARD HUGHES

As I mentioned, when we were talking about Prince, when I went to university I knew very little, but I knew it very well, and my enthusiasm got me through that process as much as knowing anything! At my interview, the interviewer who went on to be my tutor said, ‘Tell me about a piece you’ve found recently that you really love.’ And I must have gone off on one about The Rite of Spring (premiered 1913). But I’d struggle to choose between that and another Stravinsky piece in my desert island discs: I first heard Symphony of Psalms (1930) when I was about eighteen, around Christmas time, this James O’Donnell performance at Westminster Cathedral.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Symphony of Psalms is perhaps the lesser-known piece.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

They’re very different, [hard to believe] they’re by the same composer. It seems quite unlikely, but it’s an astonishingly powerful piece. And since then, Stravinsky has been my absolute guiding star, in musical terms, I must have read every book about him, from Stephen Walsh’s to Richard Taruskin’s. If I did a specialist subject on Mastermind, it would be Stravinsky – although he’s a bad one to choose because he lived to be about ninety and lots happened to him.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

As I was listening to Symphony of Psalms, I was thinking, Something about this sounds particularly unusual, and I suddenly realised there are instruments not present. There’s no upper strings, for instance – no violins, no violas. There’s no clarinet.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

And it has two pianos – and two harps! And the pianos particularly give that ‘Dunk! Dunk!’ sound at the very beginning – which Leonard Bernstein described as ‘two gunshots’. 

Who starts a religious piece with two gunshots?! Yes, it’s a unique sound, lots of flutes and oboes, and then this choir coming in… Stravinsky really could make a piece sound his own. There’s another Bernstein quote: ‘When you’re listening to a Stravinsky piece: “YES, this is the best Stravinsky piece.” And then you listen to another Stravinsky piece and you think: “YES, this is the best.”’ Whichever piece you’re listening to by him, that’s the best one. 

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Symphony of Psalms has made me think of the connection with Prince’s ‘When Doves Cry’.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

Which is what?

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

There’s no bass part on ‘When Doves Cry’.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

Of course. The upside-down version!

 

 

—

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

When I’m reviewing, for the Arts Desk, I like to go to smaller or lower profile events – often with younger musicians, or things that just don’t get covered in mainstream coverage. Especially since lockdown. I’m by no means a straightforward cheerleader, but I do go in with a view to not slagging people off. I will be honest, but I’ve chosen which things I’m gonna go to, so they’re things I’m expecting to enjoy.

 

The reason for this is I’d been going to concerts which were just washing over me. So when I have to give an opinion, I sit there in a different way. Not just about the music, but how the concert is being presented.

 

Last week, I saw this screening, with a live orchestra, at the Barbican of this Alexander Korda sci-fi film Things to Come (1936), with a score by Arthur Bliss. It had been the first fully orchestral score for a film, the first soundtrack album, and the first film the London Symphony Orchestra did, who went on to a huge tradition of soundtracks, things like Star Wars. So, with Things to Come, I was thinking: Am I at a film screening which happens to have a live orchestra, or am I at an orchestral concert which happens to have a screen? At times, they had to project the dialogue as subtitles on to the screen, because the music was too loud – because obviously in a film, you can’t turn down the [volume on the] orchestra. And there’s a limit to how low you can turn down an orchestra.

 

So I’ve found it’s really increased my enjoyment of going to things, with a friend, either a musical or general friend because you can bounce ideas off them. ‘What did you think?’, you know.

 

 

—

  

JUSTIN LEWIS

Your new album is not one of choral music, but of piano music: Bagatelles.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

Matthew Mills, a long-time friend and colleague, and a wonderful pianist, had offered to record my complete piano music. It’s nearly the complete piano music – I realised I left one thing off the list I sent to him, and then in the recording sessions, we decided to ditch one item because it was just too much.

 

But it’s a real range of pieces, some really virtuosic, some very avant-garde and quite dramatic, and then some very simple melodic pieces: a couple of pieces I wrote for my children before they were born, when they were in utero, and I played them to them when they were little. There’s one piece that’s a sequence of pieces from beginner to Grade 5 in the course of eleven pieces. I like writing complex music, but I like writing simple music. I don’t have a style.

 

There’s also a new suite of pieces where I’ve reworked some old pieces – I’m always interested in repackaging, transforming, rewriting old pieces of music, often in quite inappropriate ways. So, the final movement of JS Bach’s St Matthew Passion (1727) – this great statement of religious faith, this shattering last movement at the end of three hours of music, and I’ve turned it into a little cheeky kind of piano tango. That new piece, the Partita Contrafacta, is entirely made-up of reimaginings of old pieces of music, by Baroque composers. As with Precious Things, it’s varied. That’s my watchword. I don’t want to be doing the same thing over and over again.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And do you strive for that variety when composing for your secondary school pupils too?

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

Yes, I always do. I know them, I know what they can do, and so I can place their strengths. If there’s a particularly strong singer who can do a solo…

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And you can learn from them as well.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

Absolutely. There’s nothing quite like that feedback. Sometimes you can write something you think will be really obvious in terms of what you want from it, and then the players play it, and you realise that you’ve not communicated accurately what you want, it’s your fault. The players aren’t being difficult.

 

It’s difficult to predict what people are going to find hard, but as you get older, you get better at knowing the pitfalls, particularly in choral writing. There are some things that are hard to do, and then there are some things that sound impressive, but actually aren’t that hard to do. I really like writing for the school, I’ve been there eight years, and just about every single ensemble in the school has had something by me during that time. It’s a real privilege.

 

 

—

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

As we mentioned earlier, you spent some of your childhood in Berlin.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

The family moved over in 1983, me and my two sisters, for three years, so when I was between nine and twelve. It was in the middle of the Cold War.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Of course! The Wall was still there.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

Absolutely, a very heavily militarised city, big military presence. I went to the British military school there. My big regret is I didn’t really learn German, although in the last five years, I’ve been properly learning it as a hobby.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Are you using Duolingo?

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

I am, and I have an online teacher as well. My Duolingo streak is 1169 days [by the time this piece was edited: 1216!]. I’m grateful that I have a perspective on my time in Germany. You can read all you want about the Wall, but I was there, I saw it. You could look up and see a watchtower with an East German guard, carrying a gun, looking around. Even as I describe it, I can’t capture what that was like. We’d do school trips to East Berlin, and see the greyness and bleakness of it, buildings with bullet holes in them. It was a very formative few years, and I could have stayed another year, but me and my big sister were approaching secondary school age, and my parents wanted to come back and get us into schools in the UK.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You went to some quite noteworthy concerts in that period.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

Yes, Herbert von Karajan (1908–89) was still conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, and my parents would have regular tickets. My dad took me on several occasions. And I had no real concept at the time that Karajan was quite as famous as he was, but he was a very old man by then. He would be helped to the podium and he sat down when he conducted, and would barely move. He was just about keeping going, just by force of will. But he had a charisma, even at that age.

 

This would have been ’86-ish… What would I have seen? I can remember hearing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, Daniel Barenboim playing Beethoven… admittedly, I equally remember hearing a Shostakovich symphony and absolutely hating it. But the really memorable one was Mozart’s 21st Piano Concerto (1785), with Walter Klien (1928–91) as the soloist. And in those days, at the Berlin Philharmonie, on your way out you could buy the cassette and the score of what had been played in the concert.

 

I was absolutely seized by this piece, and I’m sure my dad must have noticed. So on the way out, he brought me the score of it and the cassette of Walter Klien playing it. Number 21 is known as ‘Elvira Madigan’, because the second, slow movement was in the film of the same name (1967).

 

With that cassette, I worked out something and no one told me to do this. I had a double cassette player. I played one of the parts in, recorded it on to the cassette, played that cassette out loud, and bounced it across to the other cassette player, while playing the next part in. I built this score up, bouncing it backwards and forwards between the two cassettes, adding a line at a time on the score – and then, when I had the full orchestral backing, I could play the solo piano part over the top. I’m kind of impressed, looking back, that I worked out how to do that all for myself.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

That’s really ingenious.

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

I also used to record myself improvising, on to cassette, these long 15-minute improvisations. Sadly, those are lost – although maybe they were terrible!

 

But the other thing about Berlin: my mum was in this local circle of parents and they put on a concert of their kids playing music in this judge’s front room. I wrote a piece for that, for piano. I’ve still got the programme. It’s 13 January 1985 [see below].

JUSTIN LEWIS

How fantastic!

 

 

BERNARD HUGHES

But I had a big panic on the day. It was around the time that ‘Together in Electric Dreams’ came out, and my piece had the same chord pattern with the descending arpeggio. Now, none of these people would ever have heard of this song, my parents wouldn’t have known, so they weren’t going to point any fingers. And it’s a very standard chord progression, I now know. But I remember having a genuine panic, thinking, God, people are going to think I’ve stolen this tune, and I’ll be publicly unmasked.

Bagatelles – Piano Music by Bernard Hughes, performed by Matthew Mills (piano), is out now on Divine Art.

For more information on Bernard, see his website at www.bernardhughes.net

You can follow him on Bluesky at @bernardhughes.bsky.social and on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/bernardlhughes/

FLA PLAYLIST 17 

Bernard Hughes

(For the time being, this site and project uses Spotify for the conversation playlists, but obviously I disapprove that Spotify doesn’t pay artists and composers properly, and other streaming platforms are available, as are sites to buy downloads and buy recordings. For consistency, you can also listen to the selections via YouTube (where available), and links are provided in each case, below.)

Track 1: WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART: ‘Ave verum corpus’, K. 618

Roger Norrington, Schütz Choir of London, London Classical Players: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hW4px6avEwg&list=PLcZMzs1nkFiv6fFQJEqSa6NUM5QUcm53b&index=20

 

Track 2: HENRY PURCELL: ‘Rejoice in the Lord Alway’

Edward Higginbottom, Choir of New College, Oxford: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_a27JP_6yI4

 

Track 3: BEN FOLDS FIVE: ‘One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwFBshjGe8I

Track 4: THE BEATLES: ‘Good Day Sunshine’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ncBUcInTM

Track 5: HENRY CHARLES LITOLFF: ‘Concerto Symphonique No. 4 in D minor, Op. 102: II. Scherzo’

Peter Katin, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Colin Davis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxBX3pu1D4g

[NB The Katin recording on the original album dates from 1970, and was conducted by John Pritchard, but that recording is currently neither on Spotify nor easily traceable on the web. Bernard would also recommend the recording by Peter Donohoe and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andrew Litton, released in 1997, and available on the Hyperion label, cat. no. CDA 66889. You can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAPucIV6Pa4]

Track 6: PRINCE AND THE REVOLUTION: ‘Let’s Go Crazy’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGtCC7bUkIw

Track 7: PRINCE: ‘Chaos and Disorder’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bQmVk4Otw8

Track 8: BERNARD HUGHES: ‘The Death of Balder: Interlude’

BBC Singers, Paul Brough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gmIKXrQG34

Track 9: BERNARD HUGHES: ‘Psalm 56’

The Epiphoni Consort, Tim Reader: [Currently not on YouTube]

Track 10: BERNARD HUGHES: ‘The Winter It Is Past’

BBC Singers, Paul Brough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqETmNZaa9w

Track 11: ANNA MEREDITH: ‘Nautilus’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7Ak8PBlO4I

Track 12: ANNA MEREDITH: ‘The Vapours’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdjHrahr2XY

Track 13: BERNARD HUGHES: ‘Gooseberry Fool’

St Paul’s Girls’ School: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZ3RJKFtfYk

Track 14: TRAD/BJARTE ELKE/BAROKKSOLISTENE/THOMAS GUTHRIE:

The Alehouse Sessions: ‘I Drew My Ship’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S_hHg0CFfY

Track 15: IGOR STRAVINSKY: ‘The Rite of Spring: Part I, The Adoration of the Earth – Dance of the Earth’

Esa-Pekka Salonen, Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iB4Jd42vyLM

Track 16: IGOR STRAVINSKY: ‘Symphony of Psalms: Exaudi orationem meam’

John Eliot Gardiner, London Symphony Orchestra, Monteverdi Choir: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PgtW3IS2AU

[Bernard also recommends the James O’Donnell recording with the Westminster Cathedral Choir and City of London Sinfonia. Again, it is on the Hyperion label, released in 1991, with the cat. no. CDA 66437. You can find that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BeRtgg0br0]

Track 17: ARTHUR BLISS: ‘Things to Come: I. Prologue, Maestoso’

Rumon Gamba, BBC Philharmonic Orchestra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWrHdUhCZmI

Track 18: BERNARD HUGHES: ‘Partita Contrafacta: II. Tango – instead of an Allemande (after JS Bach)’

Matthew Mills: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjbia46Qwps

Track 19: BERNARD HUGHES: ‘Song of the Walnut’

Matthew Mills: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx9gm00otwQ

Track 20: WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART: Piano Concerto No. 21 in C., K. 467: II. Andante

Alfred Brendel, Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Sir Neville Marriner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLyD9oHbz7E

[In our chat, Bernard mentioned Walter Klien’s interpretation, a recording of which can be found on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKOFyabRbfc]