Following the recent news that Elliott Carter has died aged 103, it's sad to hear Dad's Army actor Clive Dunn has today joined the composer beyond the Pearly Gates.
It won't surprise followers of this blog, if any, that I am not a fan of Carter's music. Too much of it just sounded like a big racket to me, though I once heard Nicholas Daniel playing his Oboe Concerto, a late work which I thought was just about the best that high modernism could possibly be considering that it managed without triadic harmony, regular rhythm or recognisable repetition. You couldn't hum it, but it was the best argument I've ever heard for the proposition that it was possible to write listenable squeaky gate music. It made Boulez sound like an amateur.
The Guardian's obituarist noted that in mid-career Carter "made use of a highly systematised harmonic system, involving tables of all possible permutations of a given set of intervals. Manipulating these systems involved immense labour and copious sheaves of preliminary sketches (well over a thousand pages for A Symphony of Three Orchestras)".
Reader, I must confess that I too once wasted time and trees in the same fashion.
"But from the 80s", the obit continues, "Carter increasingly composed free-style, by ear".
Hence the Oboe Concerto. For me the moment of revelation came when I actually succeeded in getting one of my laboriously composed behemoths performed by a professional orchestra. I returned from the first rehearsal devastated. The small part of me which feared the result might be unlistenable was thumpingly vindicated. Not long after when I began to write my first symphony I simply sat down at the piano and forced myself to write whatever came into my head. I have never looked back.
To turn to another popular entertainer, Clive Dunn was made famous by his role as Corporal Jones in Dad's Army. I can't think of any programme which has introduced more catch-phrases into the English language. "Stupid boy Pike" was Captain Mainwaring, of course, and "We're all doomed" Private Frazer. But "Don't panic!", "They don't like it up 'em!" and "Permission to speak" were all Corporal Jones. Just thinking about them makes me laugh.
Clive Dunn also had a sideline as a singer. If he and Elliott Carter should meet Upstairs, I like to think that Dunn will treat the composer to a rendition of his 1970 hit "Grandad". Now that would be an event almost worth dying to witness.
