[Another offering from Matthew Taylor-Rosnik, first published c.2007]
(N.B The transcript of this interview has been partially edited from the full-length version that appeared in the latest edition of the printed journal)
M T-R – The subject of this interview is the Scottish composer Thornton Farland. His first major works appeared fifteen years ago, since when he has continued to hold the attention of the critics with his inimitable style of composition. His most recent work, the ambitious British Symphony, is due to premiere next month and is likely to attract more interest than ever in this somewhat mercurial figure. I take the opportunity to establish how it was that he developed his unique style and how he sees the British Symphony in relation to the rest of his oeuvre. Thornton, hello.
T F – Hello Matthew.
M T-R – A fair introduction?
T F – I can’t complain. Though I’m not so sure about ‘mercurial’.
M T-R – No?
T F – You see, when I look back over my own short career, I’m actually somewhat ashamed by the predictability of it all. And personality-wise, I’m no livewire. In my rare public appearances, I’ve never once given in to my desire to do something outrageous.
M T-R – Well, I guess we could cut mercurial. What would you prefer? This ‘conventional’ figure? This ‘mildly enterprising’ figure?
T F – How about just ‘this figure’?
M T-R – Well, maybe. But I do think you’re being needlessly modest. You may not appear mercurial to yourself, but you remain to many people one of the more intriguing characters in modern classical music.
T F – Well, it doesn’t take much.
M T-R – Possibly so. Nevertheless, your lack of training marks you out amongst your peers.
T F – Lack of official training, you mean. To say that I was untrained seems to suggest that I am some sort of wild ape amongst civilised humans. On the contrary, I studied all the same things as other composers – I simply did it alone.
M T-R – This must have taken an incredible amount of willpower. You must have been very driven.
T F – Yes and no. I never considered it work as such. To be quite frank, my parents saw my musical education as representing somewhat of a withdrawal from working life. I was slacking; self-indulgently following my artistic desires. I wasn’t ‘driven’ to them, just plain lazy. And I’m in some ways inclined to agree with their judgement. Whilst I sat about deconstructing the way that Berlioz maximised the musical breadth of the orchestra, they were rushing about trying to manage a large farm in the inhospitable Scottish climate. Chickens, cows, pigs, vegetables – the lot. My musical education was an escape from making an effort, not an effort in itself.
M T-R – I see what you’re getting at. We critics do have a habit of mistaking self-indulgence for noble sacrifice. Nonetheless, the comparison you were able to make between you and your parents is hardly one that many artists’ can make. And am I not right in thinking that their struggle, arduous as it was, was in some senses unnecessary? A result, perhaps, of a certain ignorance in your father?
T F – That isn’t an unfair summary of the situation. My father was not a born farmer. If anything, he was a farmer by mistake. And whilst he wasn’t entirely useless, he did lack some if not most of the necessary skills required to succeed.
M T-R – A farmer by mistake. Could you perhaps expand on that?
T F – Certainly. My father was born in Canada and, like his father, and his father before him, he grew up to be a sailor. He started his career as a sailing instructor, but was invited in 1959 to join the crew of a yacht who were planning to cross the Atlantic, hoping to break some sort of record. Being used to sailing on lakes, my father wasn’t convinced that this was the thing for him, but he decided in the end that it was too good an opportunity to miss. Early in 1960 therefore, he crossed the Atlantic with this crew, failing to make the make the record, but landing safely enough on the Scottish coast. The night of the landing, he celebrated in style, managing both to break his right arm and impregnate a young Scottish girl within several hours. However, what with the injury – and his reluctance to repeat the Atlantic voyage – he declined to join his crew as they embarked on the return journey a week later, his intention being to hang about in Scotland for a few weeks before catching a plane home. Nearing the end of those weeks, however, my mother announced that she was pregnant. The day after this her father, a farmer, a little shocked at the news himself, went out to feed the chickens in the morning, promptly had a heart attack and died with his face in the water trough. Partly out a sense of guilt, possibly out of a sense of duty, my father decided both to marry my mother and take over her father’s farm. I was born shortly after that. On that same day fourteen sheep died.
M T-R – So your father was by no means a successful farmer?
T F – Not by any means, no. He was always more Cowes than cows.
M T-R – I’m sorry.
T F – Cowes than cows.
M T-R – I don’t understand.
T F – As in Cowes, the port in the Isle of Wight. The sailing festival. More that than real life cows.
M T-R – Oh, you mean Cowes?
T F – That’s right.
M T-R – I see. I thought you said more cows than cows.
T F – No. That wouldn’t have made any sense.
M T-R – Which is why I was confused. Anyway, I get you. More Cowes than cows. Very good.
T F – My pleasure.
M T-R – Getting back to the matter in hand. Surely either your mother or her mother had enough expertise to ensure that the whole thing didn’t go completely wrong?
T F – You’d think that wouldn’t you?
M T-R – Well, one presumes that your mother grew up on the farm…
T F – Yes, she did. And she knew what to do, certainly. The problem was simply that she didn’t do it. As for her mother, she was far gone by then.
M T-R – She died as well?
T F – No, she went mad. She refused to accept her husband’s death and continued to suppose that he was alive, albeit transformed into a goat.
M T-R – Right. So you did have a more interesting childhood than most?
T F – You could say that. But I wasn’t especially aware of it at the time.
M T-R – Maybe not. I suppose you had no reason to doubt that every child had a grandmother who thought she was married to a goat. But perhaps we ought to shift our focus now and concentrate more on your early exposure to that thing we call music. I wonder, what are your first musical memories? Did your parent’s play or listen to music?
T F – Not really. My father could sing reasonably well and my mother could whip off a tune or two on the fiddle, but nothing serious. She only played Paganini on Sunday evenings. The rest of the week she was no good for anything more than a nursery rhyme. We also used to listen to the radio, when it was on.
M T-R – Do you remember anything particular that was on the radio? Anything that struck you?
T F – Sure. I remember listening to Saint-Saen’s Carnival of the Animals when I was about six. That had a certain impact on me.
M T-R – Did you enjoy it?
T F – Yes and no. Certain parts of it appealed to me. However, even at that age I was aware of its deficiencies. With my intimate knowledge of animals, I immediately warmed to his attempts to transpose elements of natural sound into manufactured melodies. Nevertheless, I was irritated by how often he resigned himself to repeating the clichés of anthropomorphism. In the end, all he succeeded in doing was creating an image of an image of an image. It is not so much the Carnival of the Animals as the Carnival of the ‘Animals’.
M T-R – I don’t understand.
T F – I said, it is not so much The Carnival of the Animals as The Carnival of the ‘Animals’
M T-R – Oh, you mean ‘Animals’?
T F – That’s right. ‘Animals’, not Animals.
M T-R – I see. So you were very conscious of avoiding any kind of recourse to romantic images in music to which you listened and, later, in music which you composed? By romantic, I mean of course ‘Romantic’.
T F – Precisely. I have never understood the impulse towards the fantastical exaggeration of something that is in itself beautiful. The ripples of the water as a swan swims across a river are in themselves much more interesting to my ears than a French composer’s conception of what he thinks a ‘Swan’ sounds like. I don’t despise the classical canon; I’m merely inclined towards ignoring it. Not for me Johann, Wolfgang or Dmitri. My musical heroes are the blackbird, the nightingale and the robin. I have always found there to be more melody in a pig’s grunt than in an entire Beethoven piano sonata.
M T-R – So if all music is abstract, are you a naturalist?
T F – No. I may be much more obsessed in natural sounds than most composers, but I am not dominated by them. I still take them out of context and mould them into forms of my own. Abstraction is still very much part of the process.
M T-R – Right. Let’s try and examine this idea in light of your first important work, the ever-popular Birdsong Sonatas. I think I’m right in saying that your starting point here was a set of transcriptions you made of actual birdsong?
T F – That’s quite right. I spent more than a year trying to collect as many birdsongs as I could. I didn’t make any embellishments at all; I simply got them down straight from the bird’s mouth. Pure bird music.
M T-R – And you ended up with, I guess, a very large folder of one line melodies?
T F – Sure. The challenge was then to weave them all together, like a patchwork quilt, to create a piece of piano music.
M T-R – And that’s exactly what you did.
T F – It is. With only the odd line of melody created to bridge elements of the music that didn’t join appropriately, I constructed all four movements of these five sonatas from my transcriptions of real life birdsong.
M T-R – And I believe that you were kind enough to give the birds joint authorship?
T F – I was. Though I hate to say that I bagged all the profits myself.
M T-R – I remember someone saying at the time that you were not a composer at all, merely a ‘cunning plagiarist’. What do you think of that?
T F – I couldn’t care less. I am a cunning plagiarist. That ‘cunning’ is a real compliment. As for ‘plagiarist’, well show me someone who isn’t one? Art is assemblage, always. That’s just the way it goes.
M T-R – Indeed. Perhaps we should move on to examine a few of your other works. You have had a wholly successful career, no one could deny that. However, your second major piece was by no means as well received as your first, was it? In fact, there was a fear amongst some people at the time that you might be somewhat of a one trick wonder. I refer, of course, to your Hymn to Kitchen Appliances.
T F – Yes, I must admit that this piece did not go down as well as I had hoped. I think that the problem was that my raw material – the natural sounds with which I built the work – were never as strong as those with which I constructed Birdsong Sonatas. My hopes that I could build a piece of music around the sound of a toaster popping and a kettle boiling were probably mistaken.
M T-R – I would have to agree with you there. Having said that, it was out of similarly unpromising raw material that you created what is now one of your best-loved works in 1990. Who would have thought that one could squeeze such a warm musical experience out of the painful wailing of a small child?
T F – As you can imagine, I was myself unsure at the beginning. In fact, I had no intention of writing My Crying Child at that time. I was actually working on another set of piano sonatas. However, it so happened that I’d married the year before and my wife had just recently given birth to a baby boy. As I work from home, I was compelled to listen to the sounds of this creature day and night. At first it drove me mad, but in the end I decided I should embrace these new sounds rather than block them out. From which impulse came the piece of music.
M T-R – Right. My Crying Child was a full orchestral piece, if I remember correctly, but the most memorable moments were undoubtedly provided by the violinist. I remember hearing that instrument make sounds I never thought were possible. You were really able to stretch the instrument in that case; to mine it for as many sounds as you could. However, I wonder whether you don’t feel sometimes that the traditional orchestra is inadequate for the type of music you are trying to create?
T F – On the whole I would disagree with you on that point. I feel that the traditional orchestra is perfectly adequate for my type of compositions, almost without exception. It is for this reason that I haven’t stopped writing for the orchestra, or for traditional classical instruments like the piano and the violin. I have often been pressurised to try out foreign instruments, or use samples, but I’m not interested. In that way, I’m rather conservative. I like the old instruments. Old instruments and old forms are fine by me. There’s no point breaking boundaries for the sake of it. Evolution works because it takes it slow. Sudden changes will make the newspapers, but they won’t necessarily last.
M T-R – I guess this is what you meant when you said that you didn’t think yourself to be mercurial
T F – Sure. In so many ways, I’m very conventional. Having said all that, I must now admit that I am breaking one of these rules for the piece I’m beginning to write at the moment. It’s somewhat of a one off, but I’m trying to construct a new instrument.
M T-R – A new instrument?
T F – Yes. I call it the drumolo. It’s sort of a cross between a bass drum and a piccolo, but it looks like a cross between Pinocchio and a satellite dish. It makes a sound that I just couldn’t get any other way. There was no way around it.
M T-R – And what sound is that?
T F – You’ll have to wait and see! I can’t tell you anything more than that. Sufficed to say that the instrument was created specifically for this piece alone. I don’t intend to use the instrument for any other purpose.
M T-R – I’m intrigued. But I’m aware that this is probably a subject for another day. After all, we haven’t yet talked about the project you’ve just recently completed, the luxuriously titled British Symphony. Early indicators suggest that it’s the most elaborate composition you’ve ever created, if not the most impressive. Tell me how you got the idea for it.
T F – Well, it’s an idea that’s been kicking around my head for a while, but it has taken time to muster up the confidence to get on it with writing it. As is clear, I have always been sensitive to the qualities of natural sound which are inherent in many objects. All of my previous works had explored this same territory, from birdsong to a crying child. In the latter case I took on the basic elements of human sound, sound at its most primal, it’s most uninhibited. What I wanted to do next, however, was to explore the more complex territories of human sound, focussing on the particular musical qualities of regional accents. For the sake of structural simplicity, I decided to stay within the boundaries of Britain, planning to dedicate a movement to each of the four regions of the United Kingdom.
M T-R – An unswervingly ambitious plan. How did you set about making it work?
T F – In some sense I simply followed the pattern set by my earlier Birdsong Sonatas. I gathered interviews with half a dozen people from each of the countries I wished to represent and then attempted to transpose the melodies of their speech into written music.
M T-R – To transpose the melodies of their speech into written music. It’s easy to say that, but it can’t have been an easy task.
T F – No, it wasn’t. Whereas in the case of My Crying Child I was working with raw sound, here I had the added complication of words. My subjects were saying actual words, but all I was interested in was creating music. It was all about the sound of the accent, though the sounds created were based to a certain extent on the words that were said. My main concern, nevertheless, was more in trying to understand the frequency of certain notes within certain accents. Regardless of what words were being said, that is, certain notes will naturally reoccur within certain accents. The tonal range of a Scottish accent differs from the tonal range of a Welsh accent. Some notes are used more than others. The same goes for intervals, rhythms and cadences. So though I always asked my interviewees to speak English, I was very aware that each of them was speaking their own personal language of sound.
M T-R – This sounds fascinating in its own right. The question is – how did you go about trying to squeeze all of this material into a symphony?
T F – Not without some difficulty! Having said that, after wading through all of that material, I did have quite a clear sense of where each movement was headed. In each case I felt that I had a firm grip on the type of sounds I should be manipulating and the structure to impose on them. Naturally, my methods may not have been quite as structured as I make out, but I’m confident that I achieved all the goals I was aiming for.
M T-R – I think you’re probably right. From what I’ve heard, all four movements betray their roots appropriately. Indeed, the very first phrase in the Welsh movement is so redolent of the Welsh accent, wordless though it is, it’s almost frightening.
T F – Yes, I’m particularly proud of that passage. That came to me very early on. I was listening over and over to a tape I recorded of a young Welshman talking about a rugby match he’d been to as a child. As he recounted the tale, he kept repeating the name of a player whose name was Ieuan Evans. What drew me to this story was this magnetic melody that was contained within the way his voice managed the words ‘Ieuan Evans’. That same melody is contained within the opening strains of the entire symphony.
M T-R – Yes, of course. I ought to mention for our readers that the four movements of the Symphony begin with Wales, move onto England and Northern Ireland and then come to a triumphant climax with Scotland. One presumes that it is no coincidence that your birthplace is awarded with the final movement of your British Symphony?
T F – I’m not sure. I wouldn’t say that this is in any way a sentimental symphony. It just happens that I find the Scottish accent to much more musically interesting than any of the other three.
M T-R – Which reflects on the Scottish people?
T F – Not necessarily, no.
M T-R – You don’t think that the differing tones of the accents reveal something of the differing characters of the countries?
T F – Not at all. I don’t believe in the slightest that there is any connection at all to be made between the accent and the character. For instance, some people are unfortunate to have a somewhat whining tone to their voice. Does this mean that they are whiners? Not necessarily. Nightingales sing sweetly, but are they sweet-natured birds? I wouldn’t say so. The curse of a bad accent is almost as bad as the curse of an ugly face.
M T-R – Why do you think people have different accents then?
T F – Goodness knows. I’m a musician, not a linguist. Maybe it’s got something to do with the climate.
M T-R – No idea why the Scottish accent might be more musical than, say, the English accent?
T F – Not at all. That’s one of the drawbacks of working with natural material. It’s unpredictable. Mercurial even. Some people have been critical of the English movement, but it’s the best I could do with the building blocks that I gave myself. And if the English movement sounds as if it’s going nowhere, like a dog chasing its own tale, well then it’s no reflection on the character of the nation. It’s just sound.
M T-R – Indeed. And how about the Canadian accent? Any plans for tackling that one in the future?
T F – None at all.
M T-R – On that note, we must end. Thornton Farland, it’s been a real pleasure talking to you. Good luck with the first performance of the British Symphony. I look forward to its baptism into the canon of the great twenty-first century symphonies. And thank you for revealing to us some of the mysteries of your working method.
T F – No problem. Thankyou for listening.
Further Reading:
