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Long Biography First published in The Musical Times, Summer 2001
Life is Beautiful: the music of Richard Ayres I have a number of friends who enjoy the 'innocent ear' test where an unidentified recording is played and you are invited to come up with an identification and an aesthetic response. One couple even use it as a sort of rite of passage into their trust - make the wrong response and your musical judgement is forever damned. Early in our relationship they played me a tape of some bagpipe music. Obviously folk music - Scottish, Irish? But there were other instruments there too - a harp? some sort of sustaining string instrument? So definitely Irish rather than Scottish, but progressively less and less like anything I knew from there. Perhaps a forgotten cousin of Carolan? No, too abrasive. But I liked it very much and said so. Gleefully my hosts explained that this wasn't folk music but a piece called MacGowan by Richard Ayres, that it was scored for bagpipe, viola and harp and had been played to Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands when she opened a new building in the Hague in 1991.
A second anecdote. Last year one of the A Level exam boards asked me to talk to a group of music teachers who wanted some deep background on contemporary music, to inform their understanding of the curriculum by going 'off-piste' as it were. I put together a collection of more or less obscure offerings from the last 20 years, travelled down to a school near Bath, drank the headmaster's sherry and launched into my presentation. Afterwards there were questions, some of them thinly veiled expressions of disquiet ('Am I right in thinking that what we're talking about here are basically gimmicks and sound effects?'), but more of them motivated by a curiosity to know more about the music we'd heard.
One piece attracted especial interest, Richard Ayres's No. 31 for trumpet and ensemble, from which I'd played the beginning of the last movement. 'Are we meant to take it seriously?', I was asked. As I got ready to leap to the music's defence the questioner explained that she had enjoyed the music; it was not the composer's good intentions that she was querying, rather the sort of response this music, with its manic mélange of the familiar and strange, was meant to provoke. This question seems to me to touch an important aspect of Ayres's work. His music has a special gift for getting underneath listeners' defences, to engage our attention and carry us along, but to leave us wondering in the end what it is that has happened to us. At a time when Ayres's music is starting to receive more attention in Britain, with major performances at the Huddersfield Festival in 1999, for the BBC in 2000 and the world premiere of his cello concerto at this year's Aldeburgh Festival, I want to try and find out how this music works, through my own and Ayres's words.
Beginnings and (A) Penny o' (FA) Richard Ayres was born in Cornwall in 1965. At school he was involved in music, singing, playing the trombone and beginning to compose, but his interest in drama was just as strong and at the age of 18 he moved to London, intending to take the first steps towards a career in the theatre. A decisive encounter with Morton Feldman at the 1986 Darmstadt Ferienkurse led to a change of direction, however, and that same summer he followed Feldman to Dartington, taking his composition course at the summer school there and committing himself to music. From 1986 to 1989 he was a student at the polytechnic in Huddersfield and after graduating he moved to the Netherlands, joining Louis Andriessen's postgraduate composition course at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague. Since 1989, as his work-list demonstrates, he has produced a steady stream of works, most of them for relatively small ensembles, many for relatively strange ensembles, and many of them with durations somewhat longer or shorter than the twelve minute 'young composer' norm. Ayres has made his home and his reputation in the Netherlands, gradually gathering an impressive array of commissions and performances and, more recently, further attention in Germany, Austria and Slovakia. Yet his reputation is not uncontroversial; opinion was sharply divided over the award of the 1994 Gaudeamus Composition Prize to his ensemble work (A) Penny o'(FA) and the booklet accompanying the two CD set of Gaudeamus Prize-winning works1 notes that 'in the jury's judgement, works did not have to be original, but rather to show evidence of a language of their own. Judged by this criterion there was little objection to the choice of Ayres' work, but not all the critics were impressed. According to one of them, the music was just as inscrutable as the title.'
(A) Penny o'(FA) is indeed both inscrutable and challenging. It is long - it plays continuously for almost half an hour - and full of wildly difficult instrumental figures, but its particular challenge is to received ideas of musical syntax and continuity. The music is conceived in blocks of sound, whose succession tends to be punctuated by silences, so that the overall impression of much of the piece is akin to a series of hammer blows. Within these blocks instruments are usually locked into a limited repertoire of figures which are obsessively reiterated. Morton Feldman used to distinguish between the terms 'repetition' and 'reiteration'. A repetition was something which recurred exactly as it had been before, a reiteration was something said again in a subtly varied form. In Feldman (as in Samuel Beckett) reiteration seems often to be a way of testing the meaning of what was said before; only when all the sense has been wrung out of a phrase can the work move on. In Richard Ayres's music, however, reiteration more often feels like a manic celebration of the qualities of the sounds being produced; blocks of instrumental activity prolong themselves compulsively, feeding off their own energy.
Similar sorts of obsessive behaviour in everyday human life can be symptomatic of mental disorder and I suspect that one of the reasons why a number of listeners have found (A) Penny o'(FA) such an unsettling piece is this unhinged quality in the music. There is, as the Gaudeamus judges observed, a very audible unity of musical language across the work, but it is nevertheless difficult, even after hearing the work a number of times, to have a clear sense of why one block of material should follow another. Indeed, those passages where a more than moment-to-moment continuity is established are some of the most disturbing. Relatively early (bar 40) a pianissimo bass drum roll begins, underpinning the next two and a half minutes of music until it fades out. 30 bars later it's back again, this time marked 'loud' (with the proviso that the other instruments are 'still audible') and this time it carries on for nearly five minutes. The effect is not unlike that of being in the presence of someone who has done something once 'properly', but now, in an effort to be sure that you noticed, is doing it obsessively, over and over again.
Near the end (bar 619 onwards) something similar occurs. The music gets stuck, predominantly in a range of about a sixth around middle C, and different combinations of instruments buzz around these notes in heterophonic clusters. Eventually, slower rhythmic unisons prevail and then a hocketed pattern of single notes emerges. For a moment there's a sense of a shared purpose, then individual louder notes stab through the surface, the hocket breaks down and we're back to the busy, buzzing heterophony. As before, we're presented with a sequence of musical events which seem to go together - in the earlier instance the drum-roll was the connection, here it's a pitch collection - but this sequence of events seems to cut across conventional musical ideas of linear development. Just as the aggressive return of the bass drum upset the normal hierarchy of foreground and background material, so the latter section flouts the conventional compositional wisdom which rules that exposition flows to or from elaboration.
(A) Penny o' (FA) is a challenging piece, not just because of its length or its instrumental demands, but also because its continuity is so hard to grasp. Musical event follows musical event and across the piece as a whole family resemblances emerge, so that there is no doubt that this body of musical material belongs together. But Ayres provides us with few of the helpful links which might help us join up this chain of events. And, as Ayres acknowledges, it was a work which challenged him as much as any of its listeners:
I think (A) Penny o' (FA) was a significant piece. It felt like a public statement of intent, a piece which combined a lot of musical traits that had been swimming around in my mind for years. Ironically this piece also marked the end of a period of musical development and the beginning of a time of aesthetic dissatisfaction and musical experiment. (A) penny o' also won a prize and accidentally threw me into contact with the unpleasant world of musical politics and business, something which I found very disturbing and destructive. I took a while to detach myself and my work from this shark infested garden pond - I learned to surf, or act like one of those water-skating insects.2
Music as theatre and 100 Things In the works that followed (A) Penny o' (FA) Ayres's 'musical experiments' would seem above all to have concerned themselves with finding a way of assembling musical narratives with which he could more readily engage his listeners. He describes the process as:
...a gradual opening up, broadening of the horizons from No.16 (the big piano piece) onwards. I like several pieces from this time - No.24 and No.26 are special favourites. Mondriaan once said 'art must be forgotten, beauty realised'. I think the developmental process that I have been undergoing could be described as a gradual forgetting of art - I'm no longer interested in creating artistic-ness, but instead invest my energy in the uncovering of beauty, in the sounds and forms - a move away from music 'as medium for a creative concept', towards music as music. I feel that it's my job as a composer to try and appreciate the qualities of, and the relationships between sounds, and display them as clearly as I see them, and, by asking "what is it?" rather than "do I like it?' trying to keep my ego from interfering too much. Art is (sometimes) the end result of a creative action, not the goal, not the point of departure, and nothing to consider during the making of a piece. This is also means focusing less on the maker's ideas and ideal and more on the actual nature of the object that is being formed. I find I have less time for blatant gesture, less interest in people 'banging their drum like a monkey in a sacred place' to paraphrase an old Waterboys track... less interest also in a fearful preciousness masquerading as sensitivity, contemplation or depth.
One of the ways in which subsequent works shed 'preciousness' is by more explicitly drawing the theatre of performance into the texture of the music. (A) Penny o' (FA) is a celebration of sound quality, its frequent use of apparently awkward figuration a conscious strategy to get past musicians' good manners into a grainier soundworld, but the musicians remain essentially anonymous, instrumental executors rather than theatrical players. In the works that follow, Ayres acknowledges the theatricality of musical performance, although, as he says, his conception of theatre is highly individual:
The Cornish village in which I spent my childhood was also home-base for a large travelling theatre company. It wasn't a theatre company along the lines of the Royal Shakespeare Company, touring beautifully produced and staged plays into local theatres or concert halls - 'my' theatre company could have been plucked straight out of the middle-ages - they played in car-parks and fields, lit by fire - and there we saw clowns, mime, heard story tellers, and musicians, and watched acrobats, fire-eaters, and jugglers. This was not a literary theatre.
At the age of 18 I moved to a large city, and there - having nothing in particular with which to fill my days - I started watching and collecting people. I would perhaps watch the entrance of a museum, or the little stall selling pots of grain with which tourists fed the pigeons. I would read the people - think about where they were from what they were thinking, what they had seen in their lives, the pain or happiness, how they related to the people around them, why they walked like they did, why they chose to wear the clothes they did. An endless parade of characters filled every second - children dancing, old people remembering, worried businessmen. This was a form of theatre - a private theatre without a text - but a theatre with a narrative - theatre with an ever-changing unpredictable and abstract storyline - it was there I saw the deepest character portrayals, the most subtle and sophisticated relationship-studies. This flow of interacting humanity was to my mind as rich, complex and beautiful a form of theatre as any production at the National Theatre across the river - and more than a decade later this feeling hasn't changed. It sounds very simple but it was at this time that I began to realise that narrative and theatre could exist without words and texts - and my curiosity led to investigate theatrical forms such as circus, mime, dance, film, and yes, music.
Film and music as theatre? - yes I think so. I see little difference between the theatrical 'occasion' of sitting in a cinema surrounded by whispering, popcorn eating, laughing children - sitting in a concert hall surrounded by the buzz of the audience as they watch the spectacular sound ritual that we call a concert - or sitting in a playhouse listening to and watching a play by Beckett. On a deeper level, I see even less of a difference in the way the audience is involved, is drawn into, is beguiled or repelled by the events they are witnessing pass through time before them - whether this be the narrative of a Beethoven symphony, a Shakespeare comedy, or a Charlie Chaplin film - the means of transmitting the narrative is different - but the existence of narrative (i.e. the fundamental mechanism for linking events in time through human experience) remains universal. I feel this is something to be aware of when writing music - a musical performance is in every way a three dimensional event.
Ayres is not the first person to recognises that playing music is innately theatrical. It is the music's theatre that people most readily parody, playing air guitars, clutching hairbrushes as microphones, conducting imaginary orchestras, and one area of awareness which musical training can often erode is the sense of musical sound as an element mediating an emotional interplay between instrumental protagonists. While musicologists analyse and contextualise, most listeners allow music to tell them stories, narratives 'without words and texts', 'unpredictable and abstract'.
No 26 (one hundred things) is, to date, the work in which Ayres's theatrical imagination has run wildest, and he describes it as 'an opera of instruments'. It's set 'in a forest, in a theatre'; a soprano sits on her own, stage left, while a seven-piece ensemble sits centre-stage 'amongst the trees'. There are five scenes with a total running time about an hour, although the third scene can be performed as a separate instrumental work:
1) (perhaps) - the longest scene (about 23 minutes) in which 'we follow
the bizarre experiences of the singer through a series of strange situations;
discovering a phantom pregnancy, attacks of pain, a dance, a lunch break,
and a fake birth'.
The music of No.26 unfolds in much the same way as that of (A) Penny o' (FA): blocks of instrumental sound are juxtaposed with one another, each exploring a repertoire of reiterated gestures in which octave displacements are a special feature. In No.26, the 'opening up' of Ayres's musical vocabulary has led to a much greater use of apparently tonal fragments; the music is less chromatic, more diatonic, with triadic and octatonic figures abounding (see example 3). The music does not function tonally but the change in intervallic density means that the music feels brighter, still manic but ecstatic too. What is No.26 about? It lacks the linear plotting of conventional opera, although its stream of aural and theatrical images has obvious antecedents not only in the sort of experiences Ayres cited earlier, but also in the visual theatre of artists like Pina Bausch, Achim Freyer or Robert Wilson. Ayres, however, defends its claims to be an opera:
"I do see that for the majority of western playmakers and directors
'theatre' is primarily literary - 'animated text' - and the great traditions
of non-literary western theatre, or the theatre of other cultures in which
the emphasis is not so strongly placed on text, remain at the fringes
of European creative vision. The same is also true of most composers -
when I told people that I was working on a piece of theatre for the Maarten
Altena Ensemble the question was always 'oh, what's the text?'. Music
is rarely thought of as more than pitches and sounds, but the act of playing
a note on the horn has a theatrical and a narrative power, and the violin
section is fulfilling a narrative function as well as making sounds. Tarkovsky
(and eventually Fellini) was always struggling to free the cinematic image
from the 'tyranny' of text and script-writer - from the tradition of the
book - I would support them in wanting to find theatrical/musical expression
without literary presumptions. One could think of some events as theatrical or animated music, and others could be seen as 'musicalised' theatre. Should I call it an opera? Well - I don't think the gentlemen of early seventeenth century Florence would recognise it as such, but then would they recognise the exaggerated squawking and spitting that sometimes gets called opera these days? - probably not."
The art of failure and NONcerti No.26 is a work poised between comedy and grotesquerie, with that haunting mixture of laughter and paranoia that is the hallmark of a comedian like Max Wall or a playwright like Samuel Beckett. It is also, as its scene-by-scene division suggests, a work in which conventional ideas of formal balance do not seem to have been a consideration; after the expository story-telling of the opening scene the later scenes are more like a series of character sketches. This is a characteristic of much of Ayres's output: works often seem to forget themselves, going off in unexpected directions. In No.24, for example, a trio of rough male voices briefly joins in the proceedings of what is otherwise a concertino for alto trombone and ensemble and in so doing provokes the noisy climax of the first of the work's three sections. As the title of the last scene of No.26, 'Pantagruel est mort', suggests, there's a link here to a quite different artistic tradition:
At the time of writing No.26 I was very interested in the form of early novels, works written before the genre had even been given a name and long before the great tradition of the novel had been defined and the sub-conscious ground rules of novel form drawn up. I'm thinking of the work of Rabelais and Cervantes and Sterne for example - in which the reader follows the journey - physical and psychological - of a character without really being able to predict what may happen next - I suspect that even the author didn't quite know what might happen to his 'hero' in the next chapter - and in the work of Rabelais the reader may be thrown from a gruesome sexual encounter on one page, straight into a paragraph ridiculing the latest philosophical ideas. I'm deeply attracted to this way of thinking about formal structure - one could even say 'un-thinking' about formal structure - it is after all the way I experience the theatre of everyday life - one event after the other, never going back, no grand apotheosis in which all the various strands are drawn together to create a warm feeling or a happy ending - simply another day, another adventure, another chapter.
The rude male intervention in No.24 consists of fanfaring C major triads, sometimes with an added B, and, as in No.26, triadic formulations are a recurrent feature of all Ayres's recent work. Of course Ayres is not the only composer to re-examine these materials - in the last two decades Kagel, Schnittke and Glass are just three of many other composers to have done so - but Ayres is unusual in using them neither ironically and texturally.
In many of my pieces I try to turn things on their heads in some way, or twist the implications generated by the musical material. What in the beginning sounds like an accompaniment may turn out to be the figure on which the whole composition is focused, or, the loudest, most prominent material may in fact be only function as a setting for what it almost covers up. I'm increasingly experimenting with what happens when many, seemingly incompatible, musics are placed next to each other, and in writing pieces which use 'memory ' in different ways. In this way I try to find out something about music itself, and not just recreate what I've already heard.
It feels as if I have shaken off several rather heavy chains - chains that I'd picked up along the way - chains that were given to me by my particular cultural environment. Suddenly, previously sacred truths and aspirations seemed completely ridiculous - thou shalt be original, thou shalt never repeat yourself, thou shalt not use consonant harmony, thou shalt, thou shalt... So many unconscious, unseen presumptions - insane. Now I am able to use consonance, dissonance, melody, texture, elephants, clouds, snowballs, anything, from any time and whenever it is needed - bound only by the borders of my limited imagination. I look forward to losing more of these chains.
As a composer I find it endlessly intriguing to uncover small, neglected musical or sonic peculiarities, dust them off and try and place them in a context in which their qualities are more apparent. - and there are so many, every time I go to a concert, or listen to a record I hear some thing that I want to explore. I actually don't see any deep difference between the invented and the remembered - I don't flatter myself that I am inventing something completely new to the world - I'm just rearranging what exists - I think we are all busy rearranging what exists - playing around with cultural building blocks. It is how we personally rearrange our vision of the world, what choices we make or don't make, that leads to an interesting and personal musical composition - or a personal contribution to life. It all sounds rather obvious but believe me I am not the only one that never noticed these things, there are a lot of other people that never begin to notice the cultural blindfolds that we learn and are given - who knows why we don't see the wonderful variety and richness and liveliness of the world around us - art should be forgotten, life should be lived....
One small example of how we get aesthetically blinded could be our way of thinking about history and our place in it. One can, for example, see history as linear - Bach, Beethoven, the war, Elvis, and then us. This is certainly how we are brought up to think about our historical context in the west and in this present time. However, what would happen if we thought along the lines of 'what is around now, is of now' - implying, in a musical context, that the works of Mozart, etc., are 'of now', of the present time - they are recorded, played, printed, known, sung by choir, used in adverts, they are a deeply important part of western culture at this present time - and I won't even start on about other places and cultures... If a composer takes an accumulative view of history (what exists at the present, is the present and can be used) as opposed to a 'linear' view (that was of the past, this is of now) then a world's worth of experience is suddenly opened up for use and - we no longer need to worry about using plainchant, or Alberti bass, or 12 tone row, or making a piece that lasts for weeks, or that moves from city to city, or combines a zoo with an orchestra... anything - by recognising and choosing to ignoring one cultural dogma we are suddenly allowed to think and feel differently about our world..
This view of a continuously present history is articulated most tellingly in Ayres' series of 'NONcerti'. So far there are three, No.24 for alto trombone, No.30 for cello and No.31 for trumpet. Each is packed with figures familiar from earlier music - put together with Ayres' special sense for crazy dislocation. Example 5 shows the opening of the 'Rhapsody' finale of No.31, absurdly cheerful music with a slight limp. All three works are unmistakably in the concerto tradition, music in which an ensemble attempts to find ways of living with a virtuoso soloist. They also follow their classical ancestors in being divided into three, with rowdier outer sections flanking slower music in the middle. No.31 even has individual movement titles: 'Burlesque (with long scale)', 'Elegy for Alfred Schnittke' and 'Rhapsody'. Nevertheless, they are specifically 'NONcerti', as Ayres explains:
It's two things. Firstly, it's a word game - it means both 'un-concerto' and 'uncertain concerto'. For someone as 'un-literate' as I am, on the rare occasions that I discover a double meaning it has to be exploited to its fullest extent. Secondly, Concerto as a form has, for me, two primary implications: the display of instrumental mastery, of technical completeness; and the exploration of relationships between the individual and the group. The first implication is of very little interest to me (except as a temporary source of exhilaration) - perfection doesn't exist and I'm not particularly attracted to the illusion or image of the perfect. My natural inclination is for the neglected, rejected and the outcast - I collect junk, brush it off and (hopefully) make something beautiful out of it. The NONcerti are all somehow about failure, about prolonging the time before the inevitable - it's the only thing that we are all guaranteed to do, we all eventually fail, the universal common denominator.
Ayres is perhaps being disingenuous when he minimises the extent to which these works are concerned with 'instrumental mastery'. Each was conceived for particular players, the trombonist Andrew Digby, trumpeter Marco Blaauw and cellist Anton Lukoszevieze, and each presents its soloist with considerable difficulty. Each work is also intimately involved with both the acoustic physiology and larger identity of its chosen instrument. No.31 begins with a series of spectacularly low pedal notes for the trumpet and in No.24 the trombonist has a cardboard box or shopping bag full of 'mutes', in which there are less familiar performance aids alongside the harmon and plunger mutes: a practice mute, a small cardboard box, a screwed up plastic bag, a tin can, and a plastic plate. He spends much of the fragmentary middle section of the piece in search of the right mute, but absent-mindedly often has little or nothing to play when he finally has it in place. In No.30 the cellist acquires a spirit double, a high soprano. In the first movement, while the cellist has been grunting away (both literally - there is a notated vocal line full of guttural sounds - and metaphorically - he find it hard to leave the open strings or to find any sort of cantabile tone), the soprano is 'his' lyrical voice, and they are not united until the last movement (see Example 6, p.63). Everything ends in disaster, however: the cellist comes adrift of the orchestra and fails to play in their climactic tutti. On his own he enters 'with a sense of great panic', tries to sing too at the top of his voice, and is quickly dispatched by a series of falling string glissandi, each ending in a chromatic piano cluster, 'like the falling of a bomb'.
As I was asked by the A Level Music teacher, 'Are we meant to take it seriously?' At one level, of course not. This music should make the listener laugh, jump, squirm, recoil; nobody has ever come out of a performance of a Richard Ayres piece remarking just on how well made it was. But his music is serious because its brutally clear imagery engages us at many levels, connecting the experience of hearing and seeing music with the lives we live.
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