John McCabe

Summary

‘I expect the listener to meet me halfway and think, “Okay, let's see what he's got to say.”’

I’d interviewed John McCabe once before – only briefly, many years earlier – and from time to time had bumped into him at concerts. So when I started to compile this book I hoped that he would contribute to it because I was looking forward to a good, long chat with him. I knew that conversation would flow easily, not only because he was relaxed and affable but also because of his wide knowledge of music – it was difficult to talk about pieces, however obscure they might seem, that he didn't know. Given that he combined composing (in all genres except grand opera) with a distinguished career as a concert pianist, teacher and writer, I often wondered where he found time to listen to so much music.

I was therefore pleased when in May 2011 he wrote to me, ‘Your project sounds excellent. Indeed, I’ve thought we need another book of this kind, since it is a long time since the last one.’ When I went to interview him at his home in Kent just over a year later he added that he’d once had the idea of compiling such a book himself; the reason he hadn't pursued it, he joked, was that he would have been unable to be included in it.

As I’d expected, this was one of the longer interviews for this collection because conversation was so effortless. In response to my first question – about the relationship, if any, that he saw between his nationality and his music – he said, ‘Well, we can talk about that for three hours, really, or two minutes!’ Sure enough, conversation also left the main roads of music and meandered onto the byways: he illustrated points by referring to Hindemith's Mass, John Williams's film music and Howells's Missa Sabrinensis rather than the late Beethoven String Quartets or Mahler Symphonies. (I felt slight one-upmanship when discovering that he didn't know John Williams's Cello Concerto, which I’d been listening to in the car on my way to the interview.)

As we talked I was reminded of how extraordinarily wide his musical tastes were.