9 - Finding a Place in Society; Finding a Voice

Summary

Britten wrote of the pressures on a young composer, and one of these is the pressure to find a personal musical voice. Many composers of John Barber’s generation – and he is one of the youngest contributors to this book – have begun with an explicit rejection of post-1950s modernism. At college he found himself uncomfortable with the new-music ‘lingua franca’ of his teacher and sought another language and a social context for his music, eventually finding a home in the collaborative culture of the workshop. He begins with a quote from Britten’s Aspen Speech.

There are many dangers which hedge round the unfortunate composer: pressure groups which demand true proletarian music, snobs who demand the latest avant-garde tricks; critics who are already trying to be the first to document today for tomorrow … These people are dangerous because … they may make the … young composer self-conscious, and instead of writing his own music which springs naturally from his gift and personality, he may be frightened into writing pretentious nonsense or deliberate obscurity. Finding one’s place in society as a composer is not a straightforward job.

Britten identifies two of the most challenging questions that face anyone who wants to write music. ‘What is the music that I want to make?’ and ‘Who is it for?’ The ‘dangers’ that Britten perceives to be lying in wait for him are voices that I recognise. They live inside my head alongside others. It is hard to find the alchemy in which the music you love and admire mixes together with your life experiences, beliefs and dreams and eventually translates into musical notes, so that, somehow, it is you that appears on the page.

I’m a Composer, Not a Social Worker

At music college I fell apart, not knowing what to write. I had an emotional meltdown. I went in for yet another lesson without having written anything and said to my teacher that I didn’t know why I was writing this music. His response, perhaps in desperation, was, ‘I’m a composer, not a social worker.’ This might be fair enough, but 90% of my problem was emotional and not technical, and I needed to make sense of why I was writing.