Andrew Ford

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Ford reveals the roots of his enthusiasm. "It's not much of a secret, really. I am an old fashioned evangelist," says Ford. "There is a degree of self interest, of course, because I don't really want to write music for a world that isn't listening. But any kind of writing or teaching or broadcasting I do is partly to try to create a more listening public. Not just for me, obviously."

Ford says he tries to avoid jargon, and tests out his descriptions on friends who are not musicians. When drafting his book Illegal Harmonies (an extension of his radio scripts) he would send drafts of episodes to his friend Cathy who likes music but is not a musician. "She was my sounding board, and I figured if she was following what I was saying, then the writing would reach a sort of broad well-educated public. Where we ran up against a problem - and there was really only the one time - was when I was writing about Messaien. In order to write about why Messaien sounds the way his music does, you do need to talk about his use of modes of limited transposition. I tried and tried and tried to write about modes of limited transposition in a way that Cathy could understand and she kept saying: 'No, not getting it'. Ultimately she said she did but I think it was just to get me off her back."

Ford is sceptical of the proposition that music can says something about the world. The composer Shostakovich, for example, survived under the brutal Stalinist regime in Russia in the mid-twentieth century. A question often asked is: 'Was Shostakovich quietly protesting against Stalin with his music, or was he acceding to Stalin?' Ford doubts that it is possible to decide either way.

"My feeling with Shostakovich is that too much is made of the fact that the music is supposed to mean something. People are always trying to get music to mean something because it is easier to talk about then. But actually I don't think most of it does. I think music is only itself. I don't think most people would say a Bach fugue or a Mozart string quartet would mean anything but itself.

"But because Shostakovich lived his horrible life under Stalin, therefore his music is supposed to become, note for note, a response to that. I don't buy that. I think that is simplistic. I think it is often politically charged as well. It possibly extends from the fact that although everybody in the West was supposed to disapprove of Stalin - with very good reason, I might say - Shostakovich's music seemed quite nice. Therefore the only way we can explain that is to say it is a series of coded anti-Stalinist messages.

"But it might just be that Shostakovich was an apolitical figure in the same sort of way that Richard Strauss was in Nazi Germany. Strauss just was not political. He couldn't care less. He didn't particularly like the Nazis, but he never really liked governments much, and he tried to find a way of continuing to compose music in spite of them. I think Shostakovich was probably doing something quite similar. We like to think that he was some sort of heroic figure but he was probably just a composer."

If Ford believes that music is silent about the world, he nevertheless agrees with Benjamin Britten's view that composers should make a contribution to society. And there is one instance where he was drawn into saying something through music, if only to articulate some of things God cannot say. The occasion was a request to write music about the Bali massacre.

"I said 'yes' straight away without having a clue about how I was going to go about this. I took as my model the Vietnam memorial in Washington, which I have never actually seen. The thing I find very striking about that Wall, because it is so highly polished, is that you stand in front of it and you see yourself. I like that aspect of any kind of memorial that makes you see yourself in it. So what I tried to do in my piece, "Fear No More", is to write something that is really quite neutral, where there is just these chords that toll - I suppose a little bit like bells - and move quite slowly and go on for a quite a while. There is something happening in the piece but it is happening very slowly and it gives the listener I suppose (it sounds so pretentious) it gives the listener a space to think in. Maybe meditate perhaps. It doesn't force a lot of information on them the way a lot of classical music tends to and my music tends to. I wanted to try to take most of the information away in this piece."

Born in Liverpool in 1957, Ford moved to South East London when he was 10. He went to Lancaster University originally to read English, but majored in composition. At 21 he was appointed Fellow in Music at the University of Bradford in Yorkshire - a non-academic post with only one member of staff. He conducted choirs, supervised an orchestra made up of electrical engineers and pharmacists and had a budget to run a concert series. It allowed him to put on concerts with jazz pianist Carla Bley, Indian sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, conductor Franz Bruggen and the Academy of Ancient Music.

"Around 15 or so I began to give myself an education in classical music. I had the piano lessons that all good middle class children have. But I remain an absolutely useless pianist. This is not false modesty; I really can't play the piano. I can't think of a single piece that I could actually get from beginning to end without stopping. I use the piano when I'm composing but I can't play it. So that was in my background, but when I started to give myself a classical education I raided the local record library which happened to be quite well stocked. I taught myself what Haydn sounded like and what Schumann sounded like and what Elliot Carter sounded like."

Ford came to Australia in 1983, mainly to visit another place "it could have been anywhere, really". Margaret Thatcher was the prime minister and "it seemed like a good moment to go and live somewhere else." He took a position at Wollongong University having been told about it by his former composition teacher, and two decades of observing and participating in Australian music began.

"In the 21 years that I have lived here I have watched it develop a lot. When I first came to Australia I was a bit shocked, not necessarily in a bad way. One of the first pieces I heard was Ross Edwards' "Christina's World", a one-act opera. Nobody was writing music like that in England. Arguably people had. One of the first things that occurred to me was that it sounded a bit like Vaughan Williams.

"I was terribly shocked that this was being composed here and now and of course I had to realise that in many ways I was the one who had to catch up. It wasn't that Australia was backward country musically speaking (which did cross my mind at the time), but that it was in some ways more cosmopolitan, and England was more provincial - in terms of music and what was permissible.

"In the early 1980s I think extremes of music were rather frowned upon in England. So on the one hand you have got a composer like Michael Nyman or Gavin Bryars, writing very tonal music. On the other hand you have got Brian Ferneyhough composing wildly complex music. These composers were never heard in England. So Ross Edwards music came as a bit of a shock."

Ford says he did not fit comfortably into the musical politics of the time in England. "Oliver Knussen conducted the first performance of my Concerto for Orchestra with the London Symphonieta. He said to me over a drink in a pub that the funny thing with my music is that he couldn't pick the influences. I have often thought about that since. He meant it as a compliment and I certainly took it as a compliment, but it did occur to me that maybe that wasn't a very good thing at the time. If the influences couldn't be picked then people didn't know which pigeonhole you could be put in, and if you didn't fit in one of the pigeon holes then maybe your music was ultimately considered not good, or not correct. So Australia was a bit of a breath of fresh air and I felt free to do whatever I wanted here which I might not have done if I had stayed in England."

Ford considers Australia, at least from a stylistic point of view, to be a microcosm. "Most of what is going on around the world is found here. Just as you can find examples of most sorts of food here. It is a very international place."

He is less appreciative of the musical support. "I suspect the audiences are here but that the people whose job it is to find them are not always very good at it. And it is not really the composer's job, actually, to find the audience. I think there are some fabulous composers here. But the promoters and the bureaucrats, whose job it is to serve artists - let's not be under any misapprehension about that - do not do a very good job at all, on the whole. And most of them know very little about the arts."

The problem hinted at by Ford is that music which only has music as its object ("serious music" for want of a better term) is difficult to market because conventional marketers find it hard to say anything about. "When people write about popular music, on the whole they are writing about the lyrics, aren't they. Or the life stories, or the style. I find that interesting. That is almost completely true of any rock music writing you care to name.

"It is difficult to write about music, and music is the most abstract of arts, which is why Rousseau or Schopenhaeur -- or whoever it was who actually said it first -- said that all art aspires to the condition of music (Walter Pater is another candidate). It puts music in a special situation in a way because it is difficult to discuss."

How does Ford deal with the potentially conflicting demands of being a composer and media figure? He says he has slowly learned to compartmentalise his activities. As a journalist or commentator, the emphasis tends to be on openness and even-handedness. As a creator the emphasis tends to be the opposite: on ruthless selection and the pursuit of quality. Ford says he attempts to forget the music he listens to, the reviews he writes, the people he has interviewed. "They get sort of blocked out when I am writing my own music. So I can be a very tolerant, Catholic listener, but I am quite an intolerant, blinkered composer. That has taken me quite a lot of practice. I don't set out to innovate, I don't set out to be traditional, I just set out to write the music I want to hear. If you don't write for yourself, if you don't write the music you want to hear, then you are to some extent producing a fake, and it will be an insult to the audience to offer them a fake. So in writing for yourself you are actually writing for the audience; you are doing the best you can by yourself. You are doing the best work you can, which is really the biggest compliment you can pay the audience."

Ford rejects the idea that the weight of history is so great that modern composers are under too much pressure to be novel, to deviate from past practice just to appear innovative. Rather, he thinks there is now so much diffusion that there is little sense of direction. "If you are a student, it is a bit difficult to know what to do. When I was a student in the 1970s, this was the very end of post-serial modernism - and there were certain sorts of music you were meant to write and there were certain sorts of music that you weren't meant to write, and that was very good for a student because apart from anything else it gave you something to kick against. And students do need to rebel a bit. But now of course, because we live in a world which in terms of compositional style is totally permissive, there is no way to rebel. Unless you insist on writing plainsong or something."

Ford is more receptive to the proposition that commercial music is becoming more commodified, while, in contrast, "serious" music is becoming more stylistically diffuse. "The more difficult it becomes to label things and the more pointless those labels are to artists, the more that people whose job it is to sell and talk about music seem to need to put those labels on things. If you look at the number of new classical releases on labels like Deutsche Grammophon or EMI or Decca and if you compare that to five years ago, let alone 15 years ago, it's very striking how that is drying up.

"I think it is partly to do with the fact that the big classical companies are no longer run by musicians. They tend to be run by accountants now. These accountants have had this tantalising mirage dropped down in front of these accountants just over a decade ago in the form of the three tenors, which obviously sold millions of copies and made enormous amounts of money for Decca.

"The mistake that the accountants made was in assuming that this was classical music when it actually wasn't. It was show business. They thought this was now a new benchmark and that any classical recording, which didn't match the three tenors, which obviously is all of them, was in some senses a failure.

"Classical music has never sold in big numbers very quickly but if it is good, and you leave it there long enough, it will sell. It is not like pop music and I think that is at the root of the problem. It is a failure of imagination of the accountants who run the record industry. And it is a sort of failure of knowledge."

Ford is equally pessimistic about the future of government support for serious music. "When you look at the people in Canberra, the politicians, they are not what they were, are they? We are talking about some very disappointing human beings. The idea that they think they really ought to get behind a sort of major funding push on culture seems very unlikely. I don't think most of them would know the difference between Bach and Jackson Pollock."

Not that Ford is likely to let anything quell his enthusiasm. As a much-published composer and a person with wide access to musical activity, the sense is that he has much to enjoy.

"I like to hear from audience members. An individual audience member can make your week. They come up and talk about a piece and what they got from it. It is often something that has never crossed your mind. I remember being in Tasmania in the early 1990s with the Tasmanian symphony chamber players who were touring a piece of mine called "Pastoral" and individual members of the audience often wanted to talk about the piece afterwards. They taught me some extraordinary things about my music. One of them said it reminded her of getting up in the middle of the night to help a cow give birth. Another one said it reminded them of wet sheep. I took these to be compliments."

David James is a former expert on sheep irrigation who enjoys paintings by Bach and chorales by Pollock and believes that most elections are modes of limited transposition. He usually writes about money in the same sense that a celibate priest writes about married love.

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Kids Rule
Victorian IR minister Hulls recently announced the development of a Code of Practice to accompany the Child Employment Act. Since the Act governs the employment of underagers whether paid or not, and doesn't get hung up about the nature of their employment relationship, the code could have a big impact. Could be good news for overworked junior choristers with the Christmas season approaching.

Middle East gig breakthrough
Market St. Tavern in Nunawading is lifting its profile with long-standing industry legends Ross Wilson, Max Merrit and Spectrum performing, following further developments in the suburbs as previously noted in Intelligence. Maybe noise is not such an issue out there?

A bit from the pit
After a healthy run, The Producers is set to close its Melbourne season during the second week in November. Word is that Brisbane is next, followed by Sydney; good gig prospects for northern pit musos.
Eureka limps on, playing to audiences as small as 150 according to some reports. We hear backers want to keep it going until the 150-year anniversary of the original bunfight in December, hoping the anniversary hoo-hah will lift sales.

Heads Roll Themselves
The SA grapevine tells us that both the CEO and the Managing Director of the Adelaide Symph have resigned. We hear that some passing shots were fired at the Federal Government as the nabobs departed... something about audiences up but funding down. Is this the first shot in the latest Orchestra Review war? (see Intelligence Issue 3).

Florida Keys To Creative State
Also from the SA state government is the "mapping the creative industries" project, inspired by Richard Florida's FOTM (Flavour Of The Month) book The Rise of the Creative Class. It is aimed at making South Australia a more attractive place for artists to live and work. Florida's theory is that having lots of artists builds the economy. Pro musos are represented by the Adelaide Musicians Union in this effort. Like the "work" bit, we'll keep an eye on this one.

Intelligence is gathered by Major-General Richard Dunbier, RN, QC, VC, FRS (not her real name) late of ASIO Team WMD (Whoppers of MisDirection).

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