The closer you grow to someone, the harder it is to portray them. It takes a conscious effort for me to try to write this introduction to my conversation with Johannes Maria Staud because I am clearly biased in his favor: since my retirement from Universal Edition (UE), our relationship has become a friendship.

I met Johannes when he was twenty-five. I (together with Otto Tomek) was instrumental in his being invited to join UE's roster of composers and did my very best to launch his career. He is now forty-two, has achieved international recognition, and I am watching his progress from the sidelines, so to speak.

In addition to his music, I have admired Johannes's wide range of interests, which have fed his creative thinking. He is passionate about the arts from Leonardo da Vinci to Bruce Nauman, about literature from Dante to Bruno Schulz, and about political issues. His orchestral work … gleichsam als ob … was actually written as a protest against the participation of the extreme right-wing populist Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) in the Austrian federal government in 2000.

Johannes is passionate about many other aspects of life as well, including natural beauty, whether of the Austrian Alps or the Sea of Sardinia, and, indeed, about music. I have never known him when he was not engrossed in the intricacies of a particular compositional problem. He is not only passionate—he can be choleric (a word of his choice), and a simple conversation can morph into a heated debate in uncompromising defense of his convictions.

I am not really a suitable partner for such discussions—in private life, and not just as an interviewer, I am a good listener rather than a talker—but Johannes can get carried away under the influence of his own arguments, and my presence is more or less reduced to a hand holding a microphone.

Vienna, April 19, 2016

Revised May 6, 2016

Is courage of any relevance for your work as a composer?

I do have reservations about it in this context—I find it too grand, somehow. As I see it, courage applies to people who stand by their ideals under the most adverse political and social circumstances, those who resist, who rebel, and are incorruptible in their dedication to humanity, to helping the needy.

Parisian scholars Paul Meyer (1840–1917) and Gaston Paris (1840–1903) were the pre-eminent French Romance philologists in the period 1870–1914 (between the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War), when medieval French, and comparative Romance philology, were first becoming firmly established as serious academic disciplines. In both their teaching and their scholarly publishing, Paris and Meyer were instrumental in determining the place of Anglo-Norman within the discipline of French, both in France and abroad.

Although their work was seen as both ground breaking and prolific in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and other critics at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century have ably demonstrated, the scholarship of Paris and Meyer also reflected a strong nationalistic bias, in which Anglo-Norman, for example, was routinely found wanting in comparison to what they perceived as Parisian-centred francien. In what follows I will argue that despite the fact that both Paris and Meyer denigrated Anglo-Norman, and despite the fact that their long and remarkably intertwined careers may lead us to believe they had indissociably similar scholarly opinions, a closer look at the work of Meyer shows that he often diverged significantly from the views expressed by Paris. In fact, it was only Paris who was expansively outspoken in his denunciation of the ‘debased’ French written in England. In contrast, Meyer's restrained (if not purely reflexive) denigration of Anglo-Norman was consistently subordinate to his excitement in the discovery of new Anglo-Norman writing. In his analytical description of these works there was always an inescapable ambivalence, but it is an ambivalence in which Meyer was always moved by a strong ‘pull toward’, that offset his occasional ‘push against’ Anglo-Norman.

Born in the same year as Paris, Meyer emerged professionally, as it were, fully formed from the Ecole des Chartes, which he entered in 1857 at the age of seventeen. Paris had the added advantage (or impediment) of an academic father, Paulin Paris, who in 1853 had been appointed to the first chair of medieval French language and literature at the College de France. Gaston first spent two years studying philology (and German) in Germany (and later declared himself a disciple of the leading German romance philologist, Friedrich Diez).

Audiatur et altera pars has been a principle that has guided my activities as an interviewer. It was tremendously thrilling for me to confront John Cage with Morton Feldman's remarks about him, or to check with Witold Lutosławski the veracity of Earle Brown's claim that the Polish composer had been influenced by Brown's notation.

Similarly, I was fascinated by Karl Aage Rasmussen's report on his experiences as a composition student in Denmark—how he was frowned upon for expressing what at the time were considered unorthodox tastes. I sent the relevant paragraph to all the composers who had contributed to the book so far and thus inspired/prompted them to express their own views.

The interview I did with John Adams for this book led me to forward the text to Christian Wolff who had answered my three questions in a highly interesting and thought-provoking manner back in 1984. Little did I know that Adams had been Wolff's pupil of beginning Greek at Harvard University. Later on, John Adams was to organize a performance of Wolff's Burdocks in San Francisco, at the Music Conservatory where he led the contemporary music ensemble. As the older composer remarked: “How differently our musical lives have gone!”

I sent the Adams interview to Christian Wolff, especially because I was anxious to have his views on Charles Ives, a pioneer whom Adams sees in a more critical light than one would expect. That was indeed the first subject Wolff commented on, before getting down to “the courage of composers.”

April 21, 2015

Two responses to J.A.

1. The criticism of Ives I think is a serious misunderstanding (it's not new: Elliott Carter—who learned a lot about rhythmic procedures from Ives and knew him personally—also asserted that Ives's composition techniques were inadequate, too crude). Ives, though his work can, I think, sometimes be uneven, is still a great composer. And the “murky,” “overloaded” patches were surely that way because that is how Ives intended them, and/or he was deliberately trying something new. He speaks of “mud” as sometimes a desirable quality in music (and refers to Brahms!). (People used to complain similarly about Schumann's orchestration, also Mussorgsky’s.) There's grit in the music and it's what makes it really good. Or, to put it another way, Ives had courage.

It is, I believe, part of the British education system—and, indeed, of British thinking—that you study one thing and end up doing something wholly different. Education is supposed to teach you to think, it hones your brain; having a specialist knowledge of any one field is less important. Paul Griffiths, for instance, has a degree in biochemistry from Lincoln College, Oxford, which has not prevented him from devoting his life to music. Nick Kenyon majored in history (less far removed from his eventual career) at Balliol College and on graduation joined the English Bach Festival. He was subsequently active as a music critic—for the New Yorker, the Times (of London), and the Observer—before finding employment with the BBC.

That is where I first met him. As representative of the Austrian music publisher Universal Edition (UE), the “Controller, BBC Radio 3,” was an essential contact for promoting the catalog—with, for, or against. Nick became an absolute must when, in addition, he assumed responsibility for the Proms, the most substantial and high-profile music festival in Great Britain. He filled that position for most of my time with UE, 1996–2007.

I cannot say I achieved much for our composers: Nick was impeccably polite and frustratingly noncommittal. I suppose we both played the roles allotted to us by life the best we could.

He has very impressive credentials to prove he has played his role with singular success: to begin with, he was entitled to put three letters after his name, CBE, standing for Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (New Years Honours 2001), and three other letters were appended before it when he was knighted in 2008. On leaving the BBC in 2007, he was appointed managing director of the Barbican, a prestigious music center in the City of London. I am happy that he has agreed to sum up his views regarding his profession in the following essay.

London, November 22, 2015

Taste is not a tyranny. Taste is a measure of our changing sensibility. As T. S. Eliot so memorably put it, “sensibility changes from generation to generation, but expression is changed only by a man of genius.”

I start with an epitaph and a fact.

The epitaph:

The fact:

Since the conference invites a double-crossing between nations and disciplines, France/England; History/Literature, I want first to raise a number of theoretical questions regarding ways of understanding place and the nation specifically as they pertain to England in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. I will then consider two kinds of illustrative material, one literary and the other more properly historical. The questions under discussion here are for me inescapably inflected by our own current geopolitical circumstances in which whatever the nation is or signifies is, if not in a state of utter emergency, then certainly under great stress among the designs of cross-border and non-state actors, internal questions of governmentality and the all-pervasive contemporary triumph of global capital.

In the twelfth century we can find in both secular and theological realms of thought a set of strictly speaking imaginary constructions that have had important consequences for the whole course of the historiography of state formation or nation building. Their common property is that they serve to provide a material embodiment for an ideal or symbolic entity. For example, the genealogical reduction of Continental families into a male bloodline and the corollary emergence of varieties of social coercion, such as primogeniture, to guarantee the concentration of property create a nexus of time, space and land based on blood, where blood is conceived as a material entity handed in an orderly succession from one generation to the next. Similarly, the debate over the nature of the Eucharist is resolved in the assertion that it is the real presence as well as its sign, just as the miracle working body of the high-medieval saint, whose sanctity consists almost entirely in the fact that the post-mortem body works miracles, becomes both the sign of redemption and its means. What unites these examples is their imaginary materiality.

The work of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne has helped to create a fundamentally new understanding of the importance that attached to knowing, speaking, reading and/or writing French in later medieval England. No longer satisfied with an older paradigm about the ‘decline’ of French and the ‘triumph’ of English in the later Middle Ages, she and other scholars have sought to create an altogether subtler model of linguistic interaction, in which knowledge of French continued to carry cultural cachet and practical utility for significant numbers of men and women in the higher and middling ranks of English society. There was nothing innately political about the choices of language usage: while, as we shall remark below, the nationalizing tendency was certainly apparent in the later Middle Ages, it is clear that local particularism often prevailed, and that suspicion existed as much between different traditions and dialects of the same languages as between generalized expressions of Englishness and Frenchness. Rather, the acquisition of second (and third, and fourth) languages was a matter of practicality and necessity. If we are to do justice to the new appreciation of the multilingualism of medieval ‘English’ culture, when many people who had mastered several languages in varying degrees moved between those languages as a matter of course, then our curiosity to know the linguistic usages of those born in England must be extended to an examination of the language practices of people from the Continent who resided in, or visited, England. Did they learn English? If so, to what ends – commercial, social, cultural, political? And with what consequences for their sense of identity, as legally and/or culturally constructed? The present study considers those questions in the specific context of French immigrants to England in the era of the Hundred Years’ War, with the aim of giving due attention to this rather neglected area and contributing further to our understanding of the social realities of medieval multilingualism.

It is easy enough to understand why the vast majority of the inhabitants of France may not have regarded the English language as a significant force in the era of the Hundred Years’ War. English was the native tongue of a tiny minority in Europe, and if there was a ‘global’ vernacular at the time, it was surely – as Christine de Pizan pointed out – French.

Approximately a third of the English poet John Gower's (d.1408) nearly 90,000 lines of verse is in French. During the past century, while most critical attention has been trained on his Middle English poems, the Confessio Amantis and, to a lesser extent, ‘To King Henry IV In Praise of Peace’, Gower's substantial French oeuvre had generated scant interest, on either side of the Channel and the Atlantic. For French medievalists, Gower's work – late, by their standards, and in a dialect neither precisely Anglo-Norman nor Central French – was beyond the pale of concern. There are certain slight exceptions: Daniel Poirion, Le poète et le prince: l’évolution du lyrisme courtois de Guillaume de Machaut à Charles d’Orléans is one, although Gower's presence there is a mere mention. Similar Continental disregard characterizes the significant studies of Michel Zink: in his Littérature française du Moyen Âge or the more recent Nature et poésie au Moyen Âge, Gower appears but once. Despite the pioneering scholarship of John H. Fisher in his ground-breaking John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer, where all of Gower's French works receive attention, for British and American scholars, the majority of whose linguistic skills were insufficient to approach and appreciate Gower's significant sophistication as an other-than-English poet, the body of his French verse was thought (apparently) inaccessible, even daunting, and better avoided. Extremely helpful work on the Anglo-French court culture during these years (e.g., James I. Wimsatt's Chaucer and the French Love Poets, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries; R. Barton Palmer's Chaucer's French Contemporaries; and Lynn Staley's Languages of Power in the Age of Richard II), while valuable for Gower studies, nevertheless was principally focused on Chaucer. By 2015, however, Gower's French poetry has stepped forward, nearer the center of the stage. The important survey volume by Jacqueline Cerquiligni-Toulet, L’écriture testamentaire à la fin du Moyen Âge: Identité, dispersion, trace, makes a sincere attempt to address Gower's French verse, and potentially signalled a tidal shift on the French side of the Channel.