7 - ‘A real composer coming to talk to us’

Summary

The London Sinfonietta brought their composition projects to two schools that Pearson attended as a teenager – and they turned out to be the most important moments of his education, as he explained in conversation with Peter Wiegold.

PROJECT i: Cornwallis, Maidstone

This, my middle school, had an active music department. It would put on musicals every year, and had the kind of teachers who always liked to experience new things. We found out one day that we would be having some people from London Sinfonietta visiting: George Benjamin was coming in with At First Light. I was about twelve at that time, but, unusually, through my parents I had encountered contemporary music and knew who George Benjamin was. I was so excited; it was only a couple years after he’d had the Prom success with Ringed by the Flat Horizon.

We did a lot of preparatory work before they came. I remember the box arriving with the score; it looked freshly minted. We had a recording of the piece, perhaps the first recording of it. We were all excited because the sounds were unusual, but perhaps because I was already a bit familiar with the language, I loved listening to it over and over.

George came with Gillian Moore. This being the early 1980s, I think it was one of her first Sinfonietta projects. There were no Sinfonietta players on that first day, just Gillian and George. He was twenty-two, just ten years older than me. It was terrific have a real composer coming to talk to us and, what’s more, listen to the music that we had been working on as a class.

What I remember distinctly, as the session began, was the uncompromising message, especially from Gillian: ‘This is what we do. We love this music and we want you to love it too. You may not understand it at first but we’d like you to see where it’s coming from.’ They showed us the Turner painting that had inspired At First Light and George told us how the music related to it:

In the Tate Gallery there is a late Turner oil painting, Norham Castle, Sunrise. The twelfth-century castle in this picture is silhouetted against a huge golden sun.