Robin Holloway

Summary

‘While I might not be hermetic, I’m not very worldly.’

Robin Holloway's publishers e-mailed me to say that he was, in principle, interested in being interviewed for this book, and would I please call him to discuss it. I was nervous about doing so because, not having met him before, I’d formed a mental image of someone whose formidable intelligence might make him rather unapproachable. This wasn't entirely dispelled when, during the first of our phone conversations, he declared, ‘The whole thing is pointless if you don't know my music or my writings’ – in the circumstances, a perfectly reasonable remark.

In a sense, his writings made the interview unnecessary, for in his collections of articles, essays and reviews he’d already published his views on many of the issues I wanted to discuss with him. But I remained curious because, despite his speaking out against ‘The uncertain idioms of “difficult” modern music, together with its palpable failure to gain popular acceptance’, only a handful of his two hundred works have been recorded and his name seems to crop up in concert listings only rarely. I wondered why, when he writes with such eloquence about the failure of some contemporary music to communicate to listeners, his own works have not gained greater popular acceptance.

One possible reason – that he taught composition at the University of Cambridge for thirty-two years and might therefore be associated with a concept of academia that's unworldly – he strongly refuted. Another might be that some listeners, aware of his frustration with some aspects of modernism, expect his music to be ‘easier’ than it is and are disappointed by its apparent complexity and dissonance. They’ll be less surprised after reading his diagnosis of ‘the malaise of music at large – the flight to the extremes that leaves the centre empty’.

There's perhaps also a problem in that much of his literary work takes the form of criticism. Is he regarded as someone who's too easily unimpressed and who can only find fault? He admitted to me that the compulsion to speak his mind has made him enemies within the musical establishment. But his writings reveal that his senses are orientated towards pleasure in musical sound and that he's as ready to express his delight in certain works as he is to dismiss others that repel him. ‘The dissident doesn't want to be perverse’, he has explained.