The nature and scope of language use in mediaeval England were for a long time framed by the ‘bounded perceptions’ that arise when compartmentalised academic disciplines shape complex realities into pedagogically manageable narratives. Framed through the disciplinary lens of English, the French of medieval England tends to be cast in the role of the protagonist to be ousted from the field, after having passed on some language traits to Middle English, the victor in the supposed linguistic contest. Seen in a French disciplinary frame, the French of England is no more than an eccentric offshoot which withered and died after a short-lived period of moderate literary interest that contributed to the francophone authorial canon only the reassuringly surnamed Marie ‘de France’.

In recent decades a number of researchers in the UK and elsewhere have established a research agenda that allows new perspectives to be taken. It has become possible to envisage the linguistic landscape of medieval England as one in which languages, and the literary production in them, co-existed and interacted so closely that to carve out boundaries around them now seems not just artificial but actually damaging to the character of the objects of study. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne's work stands out for encouraging the use of French as a medium for writing in England to be seen as an integral part of the literary and spiritual context of the time, and the present article pursues one such aspect of the converging perspectives that her research and that of others has made possible: the integration of French lexis with English in the context of religious writing. In particular, we explore what the language of religious writing for a popular audience can reveal about the diffusion of French vocabulary in English, at a point well before the so-called ‘Frenchified’ vocabulary of Gower and Chaucer makes itself felt at the end of the fourteenth century.

The status of French in medieval England has undergone substantial reassessment in this century. It has been shown by several authors that insular French survived as a viable multi-genre communicative medium well into the fourteenth century.

Wolfgang Schreiber and I used to meet at important new music events from the early 1970s onward. He was writing reviews for newspapers and magazines in Vienna, where he spent the first seven years of his working life. In 1978, he joined the staff of the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), a major German daily published in Munich, and that is where he spent the next twenty-four years. His articles have earned him prominence in German musical life and they carry weight up to this day. I have profited from his prestige: the sales of a book of mine rose after he praised it in the SZ.

It was therefore logical for me to approach Wolfgang Schreiber for a contribution to this book. He had intended to expand on his short text but never found the time to do so. No wonder: he writes and edits books, the most successful of which is titled Great Conductors.

May 29, 2015

To my mind, the phenomenon “taste” as prejudice or judgment has to do with philosophy, language, and the environment in which we live. One could engage in enjoyable and endless discussion about it all, for it is entirely rooted in the subjective.

I think the notion is difficult to grasp in an objective fashion, for its basis and premise are bound up with one's taste and individual background, and the structure of one's consciousness and ingrained reactions. Personal “taste” always plays a role in forming a judgment as a tacit or overt judgment- in-gestation, in most cases hidden or subcutaneous. Criticism, too, as any professional and institutionalized judgment, is very possibly always linked to a category like taste, but also with the capacity to think and to speak, as well as with knowledge, experience, intelligence, and so on.

I wonder if I have been able to help you …

Robert Morris has spent most of his active life teaching composition at a number of universities in the United States, including Yale University (where he was also director of the Electronic Music Studio), University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music. He really knows what he is talking about when portraying the situation of composers in America who are anxious to make a living by joining the staff of a university music department. In recent years, he has created situations in which student composers write pieces to be played outdoors in parks and forests, the sounds of nature blending with pitches generated by the players.

As an active composer himself, over the past several decades, he has experienced the difficulties that confront creative people in their effort to negotiate the obstacles represented by the musical establishment and to get a hearing for their music. Robert Morris's survey of the music scene since the 1960s is revelatory for someone coming from Europe. But so is his detailed analysis of what he means by the notion of freedom—an analysis that was inspired by the request for him to contribute to this book.

July 27, 2015

Dear Bálint,

I have been thinking about your idea of the “tyranny of taste,” and your ample illustrations of this phenomenon. I have rather complex responses to the issue, which is a reality for all creative artists (perhaps related to John Stuart Mill's “tyranny of the majority”). I have tried to condense my ideas in the short paragraphs below, but this is only the tip of the iceberg.

First, I should say that composers in music institutions in the United States have a rather different social, economic, and historical situation from composers in most of Europe, especially those in the old Soviet Bloc. The way censorship works here involves getting a job in academia and keeping it (i.e., tenure); this often forces composers to compromise. And it was true that “experimental” composers like Cage, Oliveros, Wolff, Feldman, Mumma, Lucier, and so on originally found academic employment impossible, even if they had reputations in the press and many performances.

In his poignant text, Georg Friedrich Haas reveals what determined—and oppressed—his life and his music for several decades. For me, his confession comes as a revelation: after all, I have known him for decades and we worked together closely for fifteen years. It provides the key to many things I experienced, which I accepted as part of his personality and his music, without having an inkling of the actual causes.

His desperate battle with himself and the past of his family inspire his music. He may have suffered a great deal, but this gave birth to something positive: his incomparable art. His music may have been enveloped in darkness, in a figurative sense as in his chamber opera Nacht, or in concrete terms, with the lights turned off, as in a scene of his opera Die schöne Wunde (one of the most beautiful scores he has ever written) or in his String Quartet No. 3 “In iij. Noct.,” which is to be performed from beginning to end in darkness, but it nevertheless radiated a powerful creative expression. Light first appeared in the chamber work Sayaka (2006), which indicated in its title (Japanese for “light”) that a change had occurred in his outlook, to do with the birth of his daughter from his third marriage. Soon afterward, he composed the piano trio “Ins Licht”—Into the Light—(2007), for the concert that Universal Edition organised for my retirement at the end of that year.

On learning of my Jewish heritage, Haas told me of his family's involvement in some of the crimes of the Third Reich. Observing his painful awareness of their guilt and, through theirs, of his own, I tried to reassure him, but sadly to no avail, that his age and also his total rejection of his family's past absolved him of any guilt whatsoever. During those exchanges, we would both be quite upset and we grew even closer to each other.

I have read his text with a confusion of feelings (to quote the title of a novel by Stefan Zweig), of which joy and relief have dominated. Thanks to his fulfilling relationship with his wife and also, perhaps, to a new life away from Europe, in New York, Georg Friedrich Haas has now been able to reach peace with himself.

A paralyzed woman from distant Wales arrives at the shrine of St Osith in southern Essex, at the end of a long sequence of pilgrimages by which she has sought a cure at cult sites all over England. Even at the great Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, the last site she knew of, the Welsh woman has learned in a dream from St Edmund himself that she will be cured only if she makes yet one further journey, to watch and pray at the church of St Osith. She thanks her dream counselor, but adds:

The next morning, though, some chance passers-by are able to tell her the way to this apparently obscure site, and the crippled woman convinces her exhausted circle of care-givers to make a last, eight-day journey to St Osith's church at Chich, where the pilgrim is, indeed, cured after a night praying at the shrine.

This crucial episode, to which this essay will return, occurs in the Life of Saint Osith, Virgin and Martyr (La Vie Seinte Osith, Virge et Martire), its unique copy surviving in a collection of thirteen saints’ lives now widely called the Campsey manuscript (London, British Library, MS Additional 70513); all of them are written in the French of England. The crippled woman's story provides one particularly dense node in a rich, surprisingly varied network of disabilities and cures that ramifies among the Campsey saints’ lives. The anecdote may also serve as an initial emblem for the overlapping lost-and-found histories that have led to our current, still emerging knowledge of the French of England, and of the medieval disability culture that permeates so much of medieval art and literature.

Intuitively, I associate George Benjamin with Witold Lutosławski. I do not mean that their music has anything in common. It is rather the fastidious care with which they approach(ed) a new score, each detail crafted with utmost attention and in no undue rush to meet a deadline, with the result that each premiere became (and for Benjamin still becomes) a much anticipated musical event.

I actually knew the Polish composer better than I do George Benjamin. I succeeded in getting the older man invited to conduct in Budapest a number of times, and he and his wife Danuta came to my place, where we had long conversations over meals. None of this has been the case with George, but our few meetings, telephone conversations, and e-mail exchanges over many years have created in me the impression that Benjamin—like Lutosławski— views his work with an almost religious awe. The phrase “my music,” when uttered by George sounds as if he were talking of a being independent of him, with an existence all its own, whether it has been written, is in gestation, or being planned for the future.

All this is terribly subjective, of course. What counts—apart from the music itself—is the confession that George Benjamin has contributed to this book. It may be rather brief but it does reveal some very important aspects of his goals as a composer: new concepts, independent path, never-heard combinations. As far as I can judge, he has achieved them all.

June 2015

Courage? Surely “courage” isn't the right word. Obstinacy and patience— they are more suitable terms related to the act of composing. After all, no musician has ever had life or limb threatened by writing a simple dot on manuscript paper—unless that musician has the great misfortune to live in an insane totalitarian state.

And yet the empty page does hold its terrors—for, particularly with large-scale works, the first marks on a virgin sheet herald a long personal journey for its owner, pursuing an isolated path into the unknown that will inevitably have its fair share of dead-ends, blockages, and traumas until the final bar is reached.

I have never met the South Korean composer in person but have seen many of her photographs. In looking at her pictures one day, there loomed in the background the deeply furrowed face of Isang Yun (1917–95) whom I had visited at his Berlin home some decades before. Yun's face, the expression of his eyes, his stooping figure, the slowness of his gestures bore traces of the hardships he had undergone: both he and his wife had been kidnapped by the South Korean authorities in 1967—together with fifteen other Korean nationals living in the Federal Republic. He was imprisoned and sentenced to death.

There was a universal outcry, with Igor Stravinsky, Otto Klemperer, Herbert von Karajan, and Luigi Dallapiccola among those signing a petition for his release. Eventually, Yun was able to return to Germany; he obtained West German citizenship and never returned to his native country.

If you read Unsuk Chin's interview about her life with Stefan Drees, you are spared Yun's horror story but do get a very graphic picture of the thorny path that has eventually led her to world fame as one of the major composers living today. It is a veritable fairy tale and one cannot but bow one's head in honor and appreciation of her achievement.

In preparing the German edition of my Three Questions book, I listened to a great many works by Unsuk Chin (one of the new contributors to the volume) and in my introduction, I rendered my impressions in some detail. In 2014, the Lucerne Festival featured her music and premiered a new work commissioned by the Roche pharmaceutical company. A book was also published and at Unsuk Chin's request, my introduction was included, both in the original German and the English translation by Thomas May.

To give you an idea of the way I hear Chin's music, here are a few excerpts from that text:

Vienna, March 13, 2015

Edited March 24, 2015

In his autobiography Hallelujah Junction as well as during our interview at Vienna's Konzerthaus, John Adams struck me as a composer of acute public awareness. It stems from his realization that he is devoting his life to an art form—”serious” music—that is condemned to a marginal existence both in the United States and the rest of the world. What appears to be his innate pessimism makes him overlook his spectacular success, which has turned him into a representative figure of American music. The questions that seem to exercise his mind concern the social relevance of his own output and that of his colleagues, in relation to popular culture. I think he feels responsible for the future of American music and strives to create works that should become part of the cultural heritage of the United States, a kind of humus for the seeds of music to be composed by future generations. John Adams is also keenly aware of the presence of American music—or its lack—on an international scale and his pride in its accomplishments is tinged with an inescapable inferiority complex in regard to European masters of the past and present with composers like Elliott Carter or Morton Feldman. I interviewed both of them decades ago: they were fiercely patriotic and simultaneously on the defensive.2

All this is apparent in our conversation, which took place after an intensive rehearsal with the Wiener Symphoniker at Vienna's Konzerthaus when John Adams was still suffering from jetlag and was not really fit or indeed inclined to give an interview. The text below is the result of careful editing for which he found the time in New York in the middle of a no less grueling rehearsal and conducting schedule.

With regard to his concert in Vienna: the very program was eloquent proof that John Adams's music fits seamlessly into the neighborhood of Beethoven and Stravinsky. One accepted it as part of that tradition without any need to make allowances. Of course, the reference to Beethoven in Absolute Jest for string quartet and orchestra was deliberate, drawing its material from the late quartets (opp. 131, 135, and the Große Fuge).

For fifteen years, between 1992 and 2007, Wolfgang Rihm and I kept in touch on a daily basis. We spoke on the phone and sent each other faxes. (He has no computer to this day; e-mailing is out of the question.) As Universal Edition's promotion manager, I knew what he was composing, and also what he intended to write. It was a pleasurable and inspiring business relationship, which gradually turned into friendship, if of a professional kind.

My retirement at the end of 2007 put an end to our daily exchange, but it proved wholly natural for us to renew our contact when I approached him early in March 2015 to ask whether he would wish to contribute to my book. Below is our correspondence. I have included my letters because of his occasional references to some of the things I had written.

March 19, 2015

To be honest: I find there is far too much “hullabaloo” about the courage of artists. What else are they supposed to be doing other than what they are doing anyway (that is, creating)? More often than not, artistic activity is proclaimed in retrospect to have been courageous, but if you look at it closely (and if you are absolutely honest with yourself), you have to pose the question: what choice did one have?

In your letter, you recall our conversation where I mentioned the animosity with which my first compositions had been received. But I could not have written them in any other way! And—this seems to be particularly relevant to our subject—I never thought I was being “courageous.” Nor did it take any courage for me to carry on.

Whatever I have been doing as a composer is rooted in my innermost obsessions, passions, desires, as well as in my very own abilities, will and also in the fact that I simply cannot do otherwise. There is nothing heroic or courageous about that. It is rather that one produces something within one's possibilities. Within what else? He who follows the “mainstream” has no other choice. The same applies to he who acts otherwise.

Baltakas and I are both emigrants. We come from former socialist countries; until 1990 Lithuania was actually part of the Soviet Union.

I visited Vilnius as the representative of a Hungarian music publisher in the 1980s, to attend a festival of contemporary Lithuanian music. The few days I spent in the city, my encounters with composers and the leaders of their union, and the atmosphere of the concerts, have leftlasting impressions.

Of course, it was all familiar: Hungary and Lithuania are both small countries and their musical life was defined by the same ideology. Figuratively speaking, the dominating color was red. During the course of those few days, I sensed a certain tension in the air, especially around the figure of the Lithuanian composer Osvaldas Balakauskas (b. 1937), whose music struck me as authentic and original, free of any ideology. From that point of view, it was unique among all the compositions programmed at the festival. I had the impression, instinctively rather than based on any tangible evidence, that he was rather isolated, actually ostracized by his colleagues. Impelled by a sense of solidarity, I demonstratively showed my sympathy and we became friends. We stayed in touch for several years afterward, and I succeeded in having one of his compositions published by Editio Musica Budapest.

Vykintas Baltakas experienced the final years of Soviet Lithuania as a young man. He was mature enough to realize that he would need to leave if he was to develop as an artist and was young enough to carry this out while still in his formative years: he studied composition with Wolfgang Rihm and conducting with Péter Eötvös in Karlsruhe.

He joined the stable of Universal Edition's composers around 2000 and it was my responsibility to promote his music until my retirement at the end of 2007. Promotion presupposes close personal contact. Beyond the compositions, one also has to fathom the composer. Baltakas was a young man marked by intensity, pride coupled with vulnerability, quite obviously free of any doubt regarding his calling and whatever he happened to be working on, and yet yearning for recognition and positive feedback.

The following conversation took place on February 17, 2016, in Budapest, two days before György Kurtág's ninetieth birthday.

Concerts of his music were mounted daily between February 14 and 21—a grueling week for the composer and his wife. I was very lucky indeed to catch half an hour or so with him right in the middle of it where Kurtág agreed to answer my questions. Of course, it was anything but an undisturbed thirty minutes. Telephone calls would interrupt the interview: musicians were calling to wish him many happy returns. Kurtág would support himself on his cane and my arm and walk ever so slowly to take the receiver. Also, the door would open at regular intervals; Márta did her best to keep the visitors away and eventually leftthe room to act as temporary Cerberus.

I do not think I had ever felt so tense and anxious during an interview. I was fully aware that I would probably never have another chance and felt bad about taking Kurtág's time when he was obviously exhausted. No wonder I would forget what we had been talking about when he had finished a call and I turned on the recorder again.

When Márta returned, we had just finished the interview. She asked: “Well, how was it?” Kurtág replied: “I did not say anything of interest.” He repeated the same thing a few weeks later when I had rung him to ask if he had received the transcript of our conversation. It is far too short, he said, full of mistakes; it is really not worth publishing. He was nevertheless willing to answer the questions I had put to him in my accompanying letter and to clarify the mistakes. I took it as a sign of his tacit agreement that I might include the text in this book. I was lucky after all.

Budapest, February 17, 2016

Over thirty years ago, you told me it had taken you a long time to accept that you had the makings of a composer. Márta played some of your compositions for Szervánszky, and …

I believe you have to read Dusapin's short text much the way you listen to a piece of music or look at a painting: you have to absorb its message at your own pace, read it again, and reflect on it.

Born in 1955, Pascal Dusapin can look back on decades of writing music and he is in a position to summarize his experiences in these few lines. Of course, he has much in common with the experiences of his colleagues. When he talks of the need to “unlearn,” he probably means the same thing as Chaya Czernowin when she talks of the need to achieve genuine loneliness. Dusapin puts three dots after “History is something we live with” indicating, I suppose, much the same thing that Iannis Xenakis did when he said he wished to sever his contacts with the past so that each new work would be a wholly novel departure. He of course was aware of the hopelessness of his undertaking.)

“I knew nothing of jealousy”—with once again followed by three dots to indicate that so much underlies those words. Does he mean jealousy he has felt or has encountered? Perhaps he means both, although he does say he has never fought against others, merely against himself. That again is intriguingly rich in implications. Artists in whatever domain will surely understand just what Dusapin has gone through in creating his own world in music.

Fighting against your own virtuosity—what a graphic description of the danger inherent in allowing ideas to flow all too easily from your pen. Your brain has developed certain patterns, they wait ready-made to be summoned. Once you have banished history, the next step for you is to banish your own … (if I may use my own three dots).

October 31, 2015

Dear Bálint,

Courage comes principally from unlearning; to never again speak of the past, not even the beginning. History is something we live with … Never again say it takes courage (very presumptuous …), and that it was so hard to begin. Obviously it was not easy, but I was joyful and I still am fighting to keep that feeling today.

In asking where Jocelyn Wogan-Browne's interest in the interrelation of differing languages began, we might start with a small Australian girl on roller skates gliding (because how can we imagine Jocelyn otherwise?) along the pavement in a Melbourne suburb, singing out ‘Buongiorno!’ to an Italian neighbour and then being mortified when he replied because – already voluble, no doubt – she had reached the limits of her vocabulary. Or with the child who longed to go to high school and learn French, wondering if the French alphabet also began with ABC – or was it perhaps DEF? – and who, when she finally found out, was pelted with pebbles by the other children for of course getting 100% in the French exam. Or later winning a scholarship to a private school where she could learn Latin and German in addition to French. Or, when she got to the Melbourne University English department, encountering Old Norse, taught by Ian Maxwell, who was as charismatic a lecturer as she herself would become in her turn. Or, after graduating in English as the top student of her year, using her spare time to learn Greek while teaching in order to pay off her student loans (Italian had to wait another twenty years or so). No doubt her Greek accent is as impeccable as all the rest. Jocelyn's fascination with other languages must have been underpinned by what was, in the 1950s and beyond, a peculiarly antipodean nostalgia for Europe, for poems about May reverdies that you had never seen and birdsong that you had never heard. Ignoring the place-names of the Melbourne area – Moorabbin, Ivanhoe, Heidelberg West – she remembers poring over maps of England as a child and asking herself how a place like Ashby de la Zouch could ever have got its peculiarly hybrid name: a uniquely Wogan-Browne variant of what Australians used to call the ‘colonial cringe’.

Jocelyn's origins are not simply English, though, but European: her mother’s family had come to Australia from Germany (her scientist grandfather was a native German speaker) and her father's from Ireland. Donald Wogan-Browne was a commander in the Royal Australian Navy and was often away; when he left the service, around the time Jocelyn started at Melbourne University, he and Jocelyn's mother, Geraldine, took up dairy farming.

If you listen to Hans Abrahamsen's music, you enter a landscape—strangely familiar, yet oddly different from all other landscapes you have known. You are surrounded by shapes (melodies) you seem to have heard before but they are wholly new; you are aware of colors—timbres—likewise never experienced although somehow reassuringly familiar.

Particularly in his most recent pieces, such as let me tell you for soprano and orchestra, which won him the Grawemeyer Award in 2016 or Left, alone for piano lefthand and orchestra, which premiered in Cologne on January 29, 2016, you hear music that requires no adjective. It is not new, and it is not postmodern, it does not look backward or forward. Hans Abrahamsen has created a world all his own.

I told him as much when we met prior to the concert in his hotel and he seemed to agree—it was in any case something he was striving for.

We had had a fleeting encounter in Copenhagen in the early 1970s; I remembered a fragile young man with shoulder-length hair. That detail helped him date it to before 1974. I also remembered a smiling face and a limp. More than forty years later, the fragility, the smile, and an unembarrassed reference in our conversation to his not fully functioning right arm and leg are still there. Now that we had talked for nearly an hour, I was also struck by his quiet gentleness, his unassuming simplicity, and his utter dedication to his art. Like much of his music, he speaks softly, slowly, and with pauses for reflection.

You cannot but feel fondness and respect for Hans Abrahamsen—and genuine admiration for his music.

Cologne, January 29, 2016

The need for courage in your work appears to be something you take for granted.

The essays in this collection celebrate both the extraordinary scholarly achievements and the intellectual inspiration that constitute Jocelyn Wogan-Browne's decades-long contribution to the study of what she has recently called ‘the sheer variety of registers and purposes served by French in Britain and medieval England’. By the concomitant variety of their approaches, the breadth and depth of their insights, and their individual and collective intent to expand the frontiers of our knowledge and understanding, the authors who have collaborated in this tribute provide an appropriate pendant to, and extension of, Jocelyn's own far-reaching and widely influential labors in this vineyard which, due to her industrious cultivation and to theirs, flourishes today as never before.

It is beyond the scope of this Afterword to attempt a summary of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne's accomplishments in expanding our knowledge and clarifying our understanding of the French of England (or Anglo-Norman, as it was almost universally called, pre-JWB), but a few stand out. One is certainly to have vigorously aligned the study of the French of England with current scholarly understanding that, as she herself put it, ‘moves away from the teleological model of language as a unitary entry bound into the development of the nation state’ and thus ‘moves us well beyond the notoriously contemptuous (and influential) treatment given insular French by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars of French literature and makes it possible to dispense with the paradigm of English French as a unitary, degenerate, or static “mother-tongue” remnant’. By demonstrating – through new research and skeptical scrutiny of long-established generalizations about the ‘rise’ of English resulting in the ‘decline’ of French – some of the myriad ways in which Latin, French and English cohabited and interacted within the private, commercial and institutional spheres of later medieval English civilization, her work brings us to the point where ‘we can see instead a set of living registers of polyglot users’.