In fact I only have one such, and I couldn't immediately say where it was, or even if I still had a copy. Way back in the early 80s, before I went to Music College, I wrote a Violin Sonatine, an Opus 1 if you like. This was long before the days of Sibelius (the music notation programme which has become for composers what penicillin was to medicine), and the Sonatine was not available at the click of a few mice on the computer. The hard copy existed somewhere, and would have to be found.
In those far off days when everything was done by hand a great tottering pile of manuscript was never far from my desk, but computerisation was a great space as well as time-saver for composers, and via a series of moves, from London to Manchester, from one part of the house to another, my manuscript pile got put in a safe place. In other words it was lost.
Eventually I ran it to earth in a box under the bed in the spare room. It was so big the bed had to be lifted up to get it out. Clearing a space on the floor, I began to rummage through the enormous pile of paper.
What a lot of time I had wasted. From the period when I started composing seriously, through Music College until the mid 90s (when I borrowed some money and bought a computer), I had written everything out by hand. But it wasn't just that. The Violin Sonatine (which didn't seem to be in the box) had been written at a time when I knew almost nothing about contemporary music. I wrote what came into my head. But almost all the stuff I wrote afterwards had been done with an eye to what other people were doing, and what other people would think of it.
These were my formative years. Never mind the music, there were pages and pages of preparatory notes: rank upon rank of rows and numbers, bits of graphic design, bizarre necromantic symbols whose meaning I had forgotten, whole pieces I had forgotten, rough drafts which showed the mathematical underpinnings of my musical edifices, each pencil stroke pored and calculated over, put on one side, picked up again and consulted, finally put away in the hope that one day some Musicologist would stare in awed wonder at the complexity of my method.
As for the finished articles, my experienced eye looked at them with horror. The muddiness of the textures, the steadfast refusal to consider what an audience might make of it, the sheer lack of understanding what the music might actually sound like if you wrote notes down like these. And this was stuff which my teachers told me was good.
Amidst the utter rubbish, the detritus of one or two good pieces. I put the box back and looked elsewhere. But having failed to turn up the piece in one or two obvious places, I levered up the bed once more, dragged out the tottering heap, and with a mental holding of the nose began a second delving. This time it only took two minutes to find the Sonatine. I took it downstairs to the piano.
Of course I have no idea whether it is really any good or not, and anyway a while back I wrote a blog which I hope thoroughly deconstructed the notion of whether art can be good or bad. But I like it. It is simple, expressive, clear and terse. To my chagrin, the harmony in it - a kind of austere, expanded tonality with elements that would be familiar to lovers of Finzi, Berg and Sibelius - still forms the basis of what I do now. I suppose that in the wasted years that separate the Sonatine of 1982 and In My Love's House of 1991, say, I learned a few lessons and grew up a bit. But it doesn't say much for College that I was a better composer when I went in than when I came out.
If there was one mistake I made at the time - other than to ignore the obvious: that you should just get on with doing what you like - it was that because people more important than me said that tonality was finished, they must be right. I thought I would have nothing distinctive to say in tonal music. I was wrong. When I write tonal music, it still sounds like me. I find that I can do a lot with it. It's also what I like. (Incidentally the most startling unfamiliar music I've heard for years was not something by Stockhausen or Dusapin, but the Beach Boys' Smile, urged upon me by my 17 year old son, defiantly tonal yet from another world)
I am going to put the Violin Sonatine on the computer in the next few weeks, give it a polish, and send it off to get it played. Coming soon to a small venue near you.
