Still with us today.
Set as a haiku, something prosaic and even pointless somehow takes on meaning. The framing itself is an outworking of an artistic impulse, and a glance at the origins of the word origin shows us several things. Using a Japanese poetical form can branch into noting that the Japanese kanji for origin is a tree (presumably because of its roots). 'Original' relates to the word radical (in Welsh, too, ‘root’ (gwraidd) clearly relates to 'original' (gwreiddiol)), a word which many might associate with a tearing up of the roots and getting rid of them. Further, the Japanese 'origin' is close to a 'book' (stemming from a tree - the pictogram adds a line underneath the tree), and is also used for the concept of 'real' and 'true'. Something in this construct, then, indicates that things come from somewhere and have an embodied existence that is, by virtue of its being real, also edifying. In French, 'original' has a pejorative air (rather like English folk use the word 'hackneyed'): I guard against any accusation of lack of inventiveness by including the odd haiku, for instance.
Two extremes show one possible range of originality. A fresh piece, Thumbelina, is
designed to sound "unlike anything else": a description of her singing in Andersen’s Fairy Tales (tr. Nunnally, 2006). Composed for extremely high-pitched organ-pipes, little bigger than a thumb, its rather indeterminable and indeterminate language is appropriate, recalling Wordsworth's "sounds Of undistinguishable motion" mirroring the Growth of a Poet's
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Mind. By contrast,Toccatarama! consists entirely of quotations from 26 French organ
pieces by 14 composers (Widor, Duruflé, Dubois, Vierne, Bonnet, Langlais, Guilmant, Alain, Dupré, Gigout, Boëllmann, Lefébure-Wély, Messiaen, Saint-Saëns) set in the form of a Parisian car-chase. Both pieces are arguably original, but between the two poles, I have long wondered about investigating other angles to see the inventive process at work. In fact, Thumbelina tropes the canon of 32 Beethoven piano sonatas synecdochally by key-
note, though this is practically inaudible. Beethoven's Sonatas being sui generis (and thus as 'unlike anything else' as can be found) meant they were open to being commandeered.
Various composers have tackled the problem of originality in differing ways, with Honegger (quoted by John McCabe in Palmer 2015: 276) declaring that there is "no such thing as complete originality". One could say that Brahms, Ravel, Stravinsky and Cage utilise previous elements and transform their frames. Others such as Raff, Spohr, Shostakovich have been content, accused of, or felt obliged to let their ideas flow within set procedures (though examples exist where they re-cast set procedures such as Spohr's remarkable 1841 Symphony no. 7 for two orchestras subtitled The Earthly and Divine in
Human Life). The employment of poetry or imagery (as in the piano works of Grieg or
Delius's orchestral works) can serve as templates, though verbal texts create complications for sieving out essentials. Some composers brew their cocktails more efficiently than others (regardless of the above designation's truth) but the efficacy of each relates to the listener too. A violinist playing Hess's theme from the film Ladies in Lavender (2004) cannot but be struck by its stencilling over Massenet's Meditation from Thaïs (1894): solo string instrument, third-degree prominence, key (D major), complete with a narrative undertow of sexual longing. Some listeners might not notice this, while others might consider 'D major-solo violin-Massenet' as a topic in its own right. Stravinsky's appropriation of the past as an object which generates music is well-known (Mitchell 1993: 106), but all our experiences (not just historical documents) become a past and thus part of that reservoir.
Whatever attitude a composer takes in a quest for newness, it should be recognised that novelty is not the same as originality, with Steiner (1989: 27) even declaring them to be antithetical. Zhdanov thought that emphasising 'originality' and 'novelty' were "among the
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foremost signs of a decadent bourgeois society" (in Katz 2009: 275) as his agenda was to make composers sit squarely in the middle. Xenakis writes (in 1971) that we are "prisoners of ourselves" (in Whittall 1999: 292), for faced with the inability to create sometime new, composers find ways of coping with this dealing with their various traditions. Yet Leavis suggests that tradition itself can become meaningless since "'the English novel' can be anything you like" (1993: 11). Meyer (1989: 34) outlines composers' two divergent approaches to rules: one makes new rules, while the other uses existing rules in a new way. However, as both involve some form of recasting (which can, admittedly, show considerable imagination) they do not determine what each composer brings. With regard to originality being related to tradition, Goodall (in a discussion of Artaud) reminds us that "tradition is always haunted by the spectre of traduction" (1994: 176), which, it should be remembered, is the French for 'translation', suggesting that moving medium always results in a betrayal. Distortion as a necessary concomitant of translation means that, in being faithful to tradition, composers do not preserve a frozen dead object but change it and thereby themselves. Artists and composers, quite reasonably, have not resented this narrow cell they are locked into, but have found the wit to explore it.
Although many folk would use the word original for Shakespeare's plays, it is often forgotten that much of his material is drawn from earlier sources. That he does so, in my view, shows his originality (in its correct sense) since his virtuoso manipulation of existing material demonstrates his peculiar alchemical genius. His wholesale raiding of Plutarch for
Antony and Cleopatra (see Bate 1997: 10-12) can serve as a model for artists who may
sometimes fear that they have lost their creative spark (and some would no doubt see it is an encouragement to compare oneself with Shakespeare). My plundering of Bach has hopefully allowed for fresh expressions of older, more familiar, stories. Ravel appears to do the same with earlier piano composers (see Howat's article on his piano music in Mawer ed. 2000: 71-96). Parallels can be found in painting, too, with Manet (in Cachin 1990: 52-3) drawing on Titian for his scandal-making Olympia (1865). Manet is a good example because, despite his clear adoption of tradition, he was perceived as dangerously radical. He makes a nonsense of the distinction made by Walsh between synthesis and innovation in referring to Stravinsky's Firebird (1988: 21). The Firebird may well be a more Technicolor and steroidally-inflated gloss on Rimsky-Korsakov, but innovation can be a result of the
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synthesis which could not have been accomplished by the older composer. More than anything else, originality is being alert to the seeds inherent in the material.
Made—Made-up
Artifice, Conceit, Fabrication, Invention are all words that relate to the process of making something, though they all possess many differing associations. More pertinently, adjectivalising them spins them further out in their orbits, with artificial, conceited, fabricated and invented spilling over into areas of deception, falsification, arrogance and unreality. Something 'made-up' has a different connotation from something 'made', and yet the word 'fake' comes from the Latin facere (to make). Steinbeck's satirical 1957 tale The
Short Reign of Pippin IV is 'A Fabrication', presumably because his publishers weren't
convinced the public would know it was not a true story. At the root of these words is 'maker', etymologically drawn from the Greek of the word 'poet' (with old Scots poets often called Makars). The constructed world of an artist, or that which is rooted in a poetic world-view, is sometimes not seen as genuine and real, yet the truths one meets in drama, say, often have to be disguised (such as The Fool in King Lear) so that the sociology in which culture resides continues. Lionel Trilling quotes from Wilde, Nietszche and Emerson to emphasise the importance of the "mask" for truth-telling (1972: 119), and there is an irony that the construct which sees art and poetry as artificial itself uses pretence to mask its own reality. Composers or artists, it would appear, acknowledge the existence of masks and layers in order that folk can develop differing understandings of various strata.
While Steiner's focus is literature, Panofsky (1960) and Gombrich (1960) evoke similar perspectives in art history, where the artist builds the future from the fragments of the past, though Gombrich notes that the artist (composer) can criticise his forerunners (1960: 321). This holds for music, since we use pre-existing instruments, pitches, forms and contexts for performance. Jonathan Dove's The Crocodiamond (2003), for instance, is a sort of Young
Person's Guide to the orchestra, and yet it is a hommage to Prokofiev, too, because its subtitle is Rita and the Wolf. Even new instruments, such as the Saxophone, are simply a blend of
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quotations" (Steiner 1989: 118), though Eco feels that boundaries to legitimate interpretation exist, otherwise we get unlimited semiosis, which he terms overinterpretation (Eco 1992: 52). Yet Barthes’s comment (Barthes 1985: 194) about Proust providing a "complete world-reading system" (where every experience is somehow found in Proust) is more fruitful, and it is similar to Bloom’s view of Shakespeare (Bloom 1999: 3) as well as Western music’s positioning of Bach since the mid-nineteenth century (Boyd 2000: 242-4).
While Bach was not, in fact, forgotten after his death (Boyd 2000: 240), Hennion reminds us that the more public reverence for Bach in the 19th century was manifested by re- writing his music (in Clayton, Herbert & Middleton eds. 2003: 86-7). Bach was viewed as a very rich field but the results were more paraphrases and transcriptions, so using the word 'stencil' is useful to indicate the artisan-style craftsmanship involved. Sometimes, it is not so much pieces as types of pieces that are bewigged with mock-Baroque features (eg. so-called learned textures such as fugue or the employment of a harpsichord to indicate antiquity). While few would nowadays see Stravinsky's music as such, it is worth noting that Schoenberg, as late as 1925, saw the neo-classicism of Stravinsky as similar, as shown by his jibe of "kleine Modernsky" in his Three Satires (1928). In fairness, one should note that Schoenberg himself had just deployed baroque dance-forms in his recent and new-fangled serial Piano Suite (1923), which is something one finds in Raff's Piano Suites, Ravel, Reinecke, Rheinberger and others. The implicit criticism which my music makes (made explicit by this very text) is that many composers (Saint-Saëns and others) seem to ignore not only the notes but the sounds of the notes themselves.
One of my aims in creating 48 different and differing pieces from what might be termed a totemic piece of Bach is to show that music has remarkable potential energy that has not been (and perhaps cannot ever be) fully recognised or realised. I am, naturally, indebted to composers who have helped me look at music on different levels. Yet, while the sound that music makes is important, there are other aspects that play a part in compositional decisions. Among them is the very notation that can be corrupted to produce further material: in fugue, a tonal answer is not a true copying of the pitches previously presented but a bending of the rules so that the piece does not constantly modulate (Bullivant 1976:
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23-4). Also, classical musical scores generally rely on the writing down of rhythms, and so any modification (e.g. augmentation) is to some extent an eye-music process that a composer can hopefully make work by careful application of his craft. But notation itself can also lead the music astray, as the Tierce Stop does in my Third Service. Here, the left
hand part (on the organ) looks like it is playing D major chords, but the selected stop results in higher G flat major chords being sounded. This is not motivated by a perverse desire for complicated notation, however, since the way that organ mutations are tuned (to 'true' rather than 'equal-temperament') means that beatings occur between the 'same' notes. This results in the pentatonic chords conjouring up a distinctly mystical gamelan flavour (which is a sound world with which Anglican congregations are unaccustomed). This conversion of a notated original is something I show in The Third Degree, where the Bach Prelude is subject to a similar translation.