Conducting, the death of ambition and getting what you need

I can remember the moment when it first occurred to me that I could be a professional conductor.  I was round at a friend's.  His Mum was a music teacher and we were listening to some music, or perhaps watching it on TV. I suddenly thought, "I could do this", for I knew instinctively that I was musical enough, personable enough, confident, eloquent and manipulative enough to stand on the box telling other people what to do and basking in the attention.

I also thought, "Oh bugger", because I was about 20 and had just started a Law degree.

As it happened, about the same time I began writing classical music seriously, and, thanks to a startling piece of good fortune, managed in my mid-20s to get a second grant to study composition with John Tavener at what was then Trinity College of Music.  Swiftly I got my second study (piano) changed to conducting, and spent my last three years at College putting on concerts with other students.  I liked it and was quite good at it; at any rate I won the College's conducting prize twice.

However by this time I thought conducting a second rate profession in comparison to composition, and when College finished I knew I wouldn't have the time (or money) to carry on. I was living in London, scratching a living with temp jobs. My parents showed no sign of wanting to pay for post-grad study, which was perhaps not surprising since by this stage I'd been a full-time student for seven years. In truth, I had little appetite for it either - I was going to be a composer, and the world was there to be conquered.

Trinity had no kind of programme for trying to ease its most promising graduates into the profession (unlike the RNCM, which does pretty well now), but right at the end of my time at Trinity my conducting teacher, Bernard Keeffe, had made what now seems a very generous offer. "A choir of which I am President", he said, "needs a new conductor. They have a concert next week. If you would like to come along I'll introduce you to the Chairman". But I didn't want to be a choral conductor, I thought, and went out with my girlfriend instead.

I regret this not so much for the loss of opportunity it undoubtedly represented (which if modest was real - who knows where it might have led?), but because of the snub to Bernard (a man from whom I learned at least as much about music as from Tavener). It's true that we hadn't always seen eye to eye, but if anything that made his expression of faith in me all the more generous. He deserved better.

So that was that with conducting, for fifteen years, until 2003 when, thanks to the indisposition of a friend, I got the chance to take a rehearsal with an amateur orchestra in Manchester. On the basis of that rehearsal they gave me a concert, and on the basis of that concert made me Music Director. And so I began conducting orchestras again.

During the decade that has followed I've sometimes wondered whether I might make it into the profession. I've often conducted orchestras some of whose players have been paid, or some of whom have been ex-pros. I am usually paid myself (although I would willingly conduct a good orchestra for nothing).  But I've never conducted a salaried professional orchestra, and I've always wanted to, partly to find out whether I was good enough, partly because the better the players the more you can get into the really interesting stuff (as opposed to fixing the stuff which keeps going wrong) and partly because the money would stop my wife telling me to go and get a proper job.

It hasn't been a burning issue, but I hear so many stories from musician friends about incompetent, underprepared or downright nasty conductors who are out there (Getting work! Having agents! Earning good money!) that you can't help but think - why not me?

The answer to that of course is that, like most glamour professions, conducting is way oversubscribed. You are competing against people who always knew this was what they wanted to do, who were better looking, better resourced, better connected and possibly even harder working and more talented than you are. On the whole those are the kind of people who are going to get on, not composers who started conducting as a side-line in their early forties (and who now increasingly resemble Frank Dobson, the former Labour member for Holborn and St Pancras).

I sometimes think it's possible that I'll be asked to conduct a professional orchestra in one of my own pieces, and that, beguiled by my cheery attitude and insistence on short rehearsals, I'll be invited back to do a tour of Belorussia where we'll do Brahms 4 a dozen times in two weeks. But it hasn't happened. And until last year I minded. Slightly.

Then in 2015 I went to see the BBC Phil play at the Bridgewater in Mancester.  The repertoire was Beatrice and Benedict, the Brahms fiddle concerto, La Valse and Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements. I found myself thinking, I could conduct all these pieces, but it's a big programme. And God I'd have been bricking it the night before. I mean, all those time changes. The players won't know some of it all that well. They'll be depending on me. What if I go wrong? One mistake and we're all fucked. And that's just the Stravinsky. La Valse isn't easy. Neither is the Berlioz. And the Brahms concerto - well, you never know what soloists are going to do.

So while I knew I could do it all, I knew that it would have been a major undertaking. Yet the BBC Phil's conductor, a young Frenchman, made it look easy. He stood there, an elegant mess of beguiling dark curls, one hand on the rail, smiling at the orchestra, hardly looking at the score, a picture of the art which conceals art.

For I knew how much work it would have cost him to master such a programme so thoroughly. Hours and hours of labour - reading, learning and marking up the scores. Learning it not so that it would go right, but so that it could not possibly go wrong. And I thought, I do not have time to do this. Not and compose as well. And, knowing me, I would have found the job of learning the Stravinsky a terrible drudge. For I do not like Stravinsky much, finding a lot of his music devoted mostly to showing the listener how clever the composer is. And I am not very good at doing things I don't like.

As a conductor of amateur orchestras, some of which are pretty good, I can by and large choose the music I conduct. Moreover I get loads of rehearsal time. Over the years I've conducted all the greats. Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Wagner, Mahler, Sibelius, Nielsen - and quite a lot of my own music as well. Conducting has given me a mechanic's view into the engine of some of the greatest pieces of art Western civilisation has ever devised. What a privilege. When I look back at my early orchestral pieces I don't shudder at their incompetence: they're surprisingly good considering I knew next to nothing about how to write for orchestra. But conducting has made me far, far better at it.

I have also learned a good deal about myself. Before I became a conductor I was always one of the people who sat at the back of the room trying to be funny (sometimes) and clever (less often). Conducting forced me to take responsibility. I haven't enjoyed that part of it, but it's the flip side of being in charge. It still astonishes me that, often after many years working together, there are musicians who are not just willing to tolerate me but who appear to actually like me. How could that have happened? Finally it also taught me the limits of ambition. It turned out that actually I didn't want to be a professional conductor after all.

Of course I'm aware that the mind eventually finds ways of accommodating the unpalatable (perhaps even death, in due course), and that this could merely be some mid-life ex post facto rationalisation. But all the same I'm reminded of the Rolling Stones You Can't Always Get What You Want. For Jagger / Richards continued "But if you try sometimes / you might just find / you get what you need".

Orwell's statue and the BBC

The other day I learned that Westminster City Council has given planning permission for a bronze statue of George Orwell to be placed outside New Broadcasting House.  The BBC has welcomed this, although the initiative didn't come from them and has in fact been paid for by private subscription.

A rousing two and a half cheers. Orwell is clearly the greatest Left wing British writer, and one of the greatest British Left wing thinkers.  Whatever his shortcomings as a novelist (personally I think he's a much better essayist), 1984 and Animal Farm were books which changed the world.  Very few writers can say they've done that. These two books helped destroy the intellectual case for Communism and were, it's often forgotten, works which required great moral courage to write, given that the author was swimming against a flood tide of pro-Soviet consensus amongst his friends, colleagues and political class generally.

I like to think that, had he lived, a man as fearless and scrupulous as Orwell would have tempered his Leftism in the face of the way the world changed after the 39-45 war.  As Keynes famously said, "When the facts change, I change my mind.  What do you do sir?"  In Orwell's absence, the rest of us must look at the example of his method and try and live up to it.

But back to the BBC, where Orwell worked for two years during the war.  The inscription behind his statue is to be, "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear".

Worryingly, this is a principle which I would guess is more controversial and less widely accepted now than at any time since Orwell's death, not least at the BBC itself.  For the Corporation itself has a less than noble record of not listening to things it doesn't want to hear.

I'm thinking of immigration, where the BBC has repeatedly had to concede (In its own 2007 report From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel, and five years later in the Stuart Prebble report of 2013 for the BBC Trust) that it ignored the concerns of the general public.

Then there's Brexit, where the editorial staff seemed to have no idea that there were people beyond West London who might not actually benefit from EU membership; the look of shock on reporters' faces when the result came in spoke volumes for the collision they had just endured with the views of ordinary people.

So I would have thought another quote from Orwell might be more apposite behind his statue.  How about this from The Lion and the Unicorn?

"Underlying this is the really important fact about so many of the English intelligentsia - their severance from the common culture of the country".  

Or maybe a gloss on the original quote -

"If public service broadcasting means anything at all, it means listening to the people even when you don't want to hear what they're saying".