Lennox Berkeley on the art of music composition

Born in 1903, Berkeley studied composition in France with Nadia Boulanger, and his music has temperamental affinities with that of a number of French composers from Massenet to Poulenc though it is derivative of none in particular. He now lives in London, where he teaches and composes. His conversation is animated, and there is a touch of cynicism in certain stray remarks, though these are made cheerfully and go practically unnoticed. He seems eager to be finished, and about the next business of the day – to return, perhaps, to a piano composition, sketches of which lie on the piano at the far side of the room. He frequently glances in that direction as he speaks. [This keyboard work was probably the Prelude and Fugue for Clavichord Op. 55 No 3.]

MURRAY SCHAFER: Let me begin with a random but important question: Does a composer have an obligation to his audience? If you think he has, would you discuss this as you see it?

LENNOX BERKELEY: It’s difficult to say, but I think the answer is no. His one obligation is to write good music. His first concern is his integrity in his own work. That does not imply he never thinks of his audience, but it cannot occupy the primary position in his imagination.

MS: But you admit there is some thought for the audience. Could you explain at just what point in the creative process you become aware of your prospective audience and begin to consider it? Does it enter into the planning that precedes the work, does it ever affect the work in progress, or does it concern you only after your completed work is given a public performance?

LB: I don’t think I am really aware of the audience at all when I’m writing music. It’s perfectly true that I do want to communicate and I do want people to understand what they are hearing. I wouldn’t see it in quite the way you have put it. I have a natural desire to give a certain amount of enjoyment to the largest number of people possible and that may condition the type of music I write, but I don’t think any more conscious thought of an audience comes into it.

MS: Occasionally I have noticed critics deploring your later works for their departure from the earlier style of your Serenade for String Orchestra. This is a common enough reproach for a composer to experience. You obviously must feel your present style to be an improvement on your former, or you would not have changed it. In what ways do you feel this to be so?

LB: In the first place, it’s natural for a composer to feel a need to enlarge his idiom. It’s like renewing yourself with fresh energy, trying to discover the real limit of your creative fertility. You don’t want to repeat yourself. Once you feel you have said everything you have to say in your old style, you want to alter it somehow, expand it, revitalize your thinking. Perhaps this fishing for fresh resources is not strictly an improvement. I’d put it this way: what is right at one moment in a composer’s career is not right at another moment. Sometimes this need for a change becomes felt at a time when one is unprepared for it. I, for example, went through a very difficult period when I found it almost impossible to compose at all. I wanted to enlarge my musical vocabulary but I didn’t know quite how. I got stuck and just couldn’t write.

MS: Your music has been called French in temperament. To what extent would you disown this word?

LB: I don’t know that I would disown it. I have certain affinities with French composers and always have had. I was particularly drawn to them when I was young – especially Ravel – but all of them, too. Since then other influences have come to bear, but I can still say that the qualities I like in music – clarity, economy and restraint – are qualities of most French music. I wouldn’t say any French composer has influenced me directly, with the possible exception of Ravel who may have influenced my youthful compositions; I can’t think of anything in particular now though. I don’t see anything essentially wrong with an English composer feeling temperamental affinities with the music of other countries. Music has become increasingly international during my lifetime and this is probably a healthy thing. Contemporary music all tends to sound alike anyway. Perhaps I should simply say it sounds international.

MS: How do the French feel about your music?

LB: I don’t have many performances in France, but then no one seems to, except French composers.

MS: Your ‘temperamental affinity’ with the French drew you to France for most of your musical education. In what way did it differ from what you might have had in England?

LB: When I was twenty-two I went to Paris and studied with Nadia Boulanger who worked through the theory of music with me. I did counterpoint and fugue with her; and she was the one who helped me with my first attempts at composition. There was quite a difference of outlook between the French and English during my days as a student. The French were much more severe in matters of technique. For example, we were taught solfège in a much more rigorous way than young musicians are taught ear-training here. We were also obliged to do strict text-book counterpoint and that seems to me to be a subject that is very much side-stepped over here.

MS: And yet, France produced the avant-garde and England the academicians.

LB: English composers were rather backward in those days, although they are certainly not now. I think this was due to an insufficient musical education. English composers, at least many of them, were slightly on the amateurish side. But there has been such an emphasis on technique in recent years both here and elsewhere, that one could not level this criticism against the English composer today. Perhaps it’s going too far the other way.

MS: A few questions about the creative process. Firstly, do ideas ever come to you at irregular times of the day or night when you are not actually working?

LB: Very seldom. I have known it to happen, but I generally find that it’s in the process of working, of trying to induce ideas, that they do come.

MS: You don’t carry a notebook with you then?

LB: There would be nothing in it worth using. [Murray Schafer adds here, In reading the typescript before publication, Berkeley was prompted to add the following comment:] Perhaps it’s a slight exaggeration to say that ideas never come to me when I’m not actually working. But if I’m not working I usually forget them, so they might as well not have come in the first place. Sometimes I sketch out brief ideas when they come to me – just short notes, sometimes just a rhythm. Occasionally, after I’ve been composing, ideas still come. My mind may have been clouded; I may not have been able to see the solution I was seeking. Later, while my mind is still absorbed with the work, various possible solutions present themselves and I sketch them down whenever I can. This subsequent reflection is most vital and often rewarding. I think over the composition in my mind as far as it has gone, and try to imagine where it is going from the point of view of form. Each time I think it out to the point where I finished working, the various possibilities are eliminated or consolidated and my conception becomes more precise.

MS: A moment ago you said it was generally while in the process of ‘trying to induce ideas’ that they came. Do you have any special method of inducing ideas?

LB: Sometimes I improvise. Generally this doesn’t help because I find I am wandering and not getting to the precise facts of what is at hand. But sometimes the contact with actual sound at the piano helps me to get started. I may even play over someone else’s music. This may be on the less imaginative days. Every day I attempt to compose for three to four hours in the morning. I can tell after about half an hour’s concentration whether I’m going to get anywhere. If not, there are always lots of mechanical things to be done, like scoring or copying.

MS: How do you feel if, after half an hour, you get nowhere?

LB: I feel I shall never be able to compose again.

MS: Does [that] present distress affect your past too? Do you feel everything you have ever done is hopeless?

LB: Perhaps that too, but I’m more worried about the future; it seems so barren.

MS: How does a composer feel when he goes for lengthy periods without being able to compose?

LB: It’s terrible. I’m glad to have that period of my career behind me. If I ever feel the need to alter my style again I can only hope that the appropriate solution will present itself in the same instant as the need arises.

MS: Although it was a struggle, you did manage to see your way clear to work again. What has your present idiom gained as a result of this?

LB: The change wasn’t all that great you know. My style today is less diatonic, I might say harmonically less ordinary, than it was before. It’s not atonal of course; I can’t express myself naturally in an atonal style. Yes, I’m satisfied to put it that way: it’s harmonically less ordinary. And I’ve managed to gain a greater freedom. I should have to wait a few years to be certain, but I rather hope and feel my present work is my best. But then that’s natural. Composers are always inclined to see their latest work as their best.

MS: It is a well-known, though lamentable, fact that creative artists are often ahead of their time. Do you feel that the gap between composer and audience is greater today than in the past?

LB: I do. It is, of course, difficult to affirm the exact relationship during the various past epochs when this gap was most strongly felt; but when one thinks of the most advanced kinds of music that are being written, it does seem that today there is a very wide gulf between the music and the musical public. I think there is fault on both sides.

MS: Going a step further, to what extent does criticism affect your work?

LB: When one is a beginner one minds terribly about criticism, and adverse criticism is extremely discouraging. One is still unsure of oneself, and probably often wonders if one’s critics are correct and whether one has what it takes to be a composer. At least I was like that. I find now that naturally I am pleased by favourable criticisms and somewhat annoyed by bad ones, but it doesn’t affect me very much. I will say, that if I felt a critic was right, I would take his reprimands into consideration in subsequent works, and it has happened occasionally that I have been made conscious of a weakness in my work by adverse criticism; but generally I know myself whether I have done what I was trying to do. What I find most annoying is when a critic sits in judgment on a work and hearing it only once uses the kind of terms that are much too definite to correspond with what he can possibly know of the work. Still, criticism is important to the creative artist. I can’t believe anyone could be completely indifferent to it. One wouldn’t be human if one were.

MS: Schoenberg has described the importance of the visual to the composer. Do you ever think of music in visual terms?

LB: Never. Nor in literary terms either. I even find it difficult to give titles of a non-musical kind to my pieces. I do find I think in visual terms to some extent when I am writing for the stage, though this is not in the sense implied by Schoenberg at all. I like writing incidental music for the stage and often find that visualising the drama on the stage helps me with my musical ideas. That’s the only way the visual enters into it as far as I am concerned.

MS: With vocal music, do you find words an encouragement or an impediment?

LB: Like many composers I began by writing a great many songs. In the early stages it seems, in some way or other, to be easier. Now I find it harder. It may be that, when one is still unsure of one’s musical ideas, words are a help to the imagination; later, when one becomes more secure musically, one becomes more critical of the value of words in promoting musical ideas. One’s sense of form is more acute. One has definite ideas about how one wants to shape one’s music, and words can often be inhibiting.

MS: You once said you owed a great deal to Ravel for some advice he gave you.

LB: I had an introduction to Ravel, and when I was in Paris he was very kind, often inviting me over to his home. He didn’t at that time accept any pupils, but he was always prepared to look at the work of young musicians in whom he took an interest and give advice. He was very insistent on meticulous care being given to the form and balance of a piece. He held the view that, if one had something individual to say, it would come out anyway; but that one must learn to say it as articulately, and in as well-balanced a way, as possible.

MS: In closing, may I ask you, are you glad or sorry you are not a young composer at the beginning of his career today?

LB: Who wouldn’t like to be young? On the other hand, I think it is very difficult to be a young composer at this particular moment. There is a tendency for everyone to be pushed into conforming to the dodecaphonic way of composing. Unless you conform you risk not being taken seriously. A composer of my generation had a chance to establish himself before all this occurred. It’s difficult to know exactly how a young composer might feel about this. If I were twenty today I might see things quite differently. But I think I am not exaggerating, or speaking as someone whose age puts him completely out of touch with the contemporary scene, when I say that there are many serious problems facing the young composer today that were not present when I was young.