From Sir Gawain to COVID: A Composer's view of storytelling and fantasy

Hello and welcome to MythMakers, the podcast from the Oxford Centre from Fantasy. Now my name is Julia Golding, I'm an author, but I'm also the director of the Centre. And today I am joined by good friend Richard Blackford, who is a composer. Now Richard has composed music ranging from pieces for the film and TV, all the way through to classical pieces composed or commissioned by orchestras and choirs. Now I want to take you back to the beginning of the friendship between my family and Richard. And that is all to do with Sir Gowain and the Green Knight. This is a Simon Armitage poetry version, and as we are talking at Christmas I thought I read you just a little bit to set the story of Sir Gowain and then Richard can explain where our connection is with this story. It was Christmas at Camelot, King Arthur's court where the great and the good of the land had gathered, all the righteous lords of the ranks of the round table, quite properly quarousing and reveling in pleasure. So that's how Sir Gowain in the Green Knight opens a Christmas game that goes horribly wrong, so be warned if you're preparing to play games over Christmas. So Richard, what is your connection to Sir Gowain in the Green Knight? Explain for the world. Well, I came back from studying in Italy at the age of about 23 and had no work on the stocks at all. And Peter Saunders, who then of course became your father-in-law, phoned up the Royal College of Music and said, is there someone who would be interested in writing a community opera for the village of Blueberry? And my composition professor chose me. I came to Blueberry, Met Peter and the designer, various other people involved with the production. And they said, yes, we think that you're the right person for this commission. What would you like to do? I'd always been fascinated by the story of Gowain in the Green Knight, as you say, Christmas game that goes wrong. And also the whole idea of the Knights of the Court of King Arthur being child-sized, being miniature, to the Court of Bertilac, alias the Green Knight, who are all giants. And so this seemed to be an ideal opportunity to write something for children and adults to involve the whole village and large orchestras as well of Amateur enthusiastic Amateur players. And that was the beginning of my relationship with the village of Blueberry. And here I am all these years later living still in Blueberry. Yes, so before we go and talking more about storytelling through music, you did go on from that, from these humble beginnings of community operas to write a piece about Martin Luther King with Maya Angelou as your lyricist, for the second inauguration of President Clinton. So from Little Acorns, great oaks have grown. So thinking about Gowain in the Green Knight, that's a story really beloved by many listeners to this podcast, not least because Tolkien himself was one of the world experts on this story and loved it. You're right to pick up on that word, childlike court, because if I remember back in my studies, that is that one of the words used to describe the court of Camelot is childlike. This is why it contrasts the world of the Green Knight giant. And it strikes me that any creative has to have an element of childlike play to the way they approach creation. When you were thinking of how to musically tell that story, what do you do? How do you come up with your ideas? How do you get your play in music going? If you remember back then, it is a while ago. Yes, well, we're talking about 1978, so it wasn't exactly yesterday. At your right, the Green Knight actually called, he dismisses the court of King Arthur's all beardless boys. And so we had a troupe, a large troupe of beardless boys playing the court of King Arthur. I think one of the things that I love about the story is the fact that it's a journey. It's a journey from the safety. And in some ways, cosiness of the court of King Arthur, where everything is ordered and everything is welcoming. It's an archetypal Christmas and New Year experience to an unknown and very bleak world through a winter landscape to the Green Chapel, where Gowen has to meet the Green Knight a year from the day in which he has his axe blow at the Green Knight's head. Many of your listeners will know the story goes that the Green Knight has his head chopped off and then promptly picks it up and puts it on his neck again. And then says, right, you've had your blow at me, I'll meet you now a year from now, and then I'll have my blow at you. So I think one of the touching things about the tale is the way in which Gowen is tempted to give up the Knightly vows that he's taken by a number of things, by a girdle that will render him invincible, that he should actually conceal to his host, Lord Bertolak, whose castle he goes to visit. And then there's some rather interesting advances by Bertolak's wife to him as well, which he manages more or less to rebuff. But it shows, I think, it's a story about fallibility, and Gowen doesn't conceal everything, he doesn't conceal the girdle, but the Green Knight forgives him. And I think it's such a touching story that all of us are fallible, even if we like to call ourselves knights in literally shining armor, but we all fail, and there are kind good people who forgive our faults. It's a very interesting kind of quest, isn't it, because he has, he has to go on a quest to find the place this Green Knight, so that's part of that is, but he also sort of knows he's going to his death. So there's a very, it goes from the warmth of the court and the childlike games to this quite adult cold world. It's very atmospherically written, it's the only line of middle English, I can quote, is the snore snittered fall snart, which is in there, which I always say when it snows. It's got very muscular sort of lovely language describing the landscapes, and then you get the adult temptations of the wife approaching him. And the temptation to back, you know, you know, stay in bed, not go out, but he does, we're plot spoiling here, I'm sorry guys, but it has been out for about a thousand years. I think we're allowed to say he does, he does actually come good at the end. And as you say, it's his, he's forgiven for his faults, which is a very uplifting message and probably what it's all heading towards. So what do you do with this musically? How, how can you tell stories through music? Well, I suppose there's a degree of color that could be brought to the orchestration for something like a community opera. You can write for things that you never normally would write for, like we had a consort of recorders, we had a consort of guitars, we had a whole group of string players who only played open strings. So you found six or seven year old children just, you know, really wholeheartedly playing their open strings in one of the storm sequences. And so I think the colors were very important. Oh, we also had tuned wine glasses that several people played to make a very strange sound for the court of Bertalak and the sorceress, Morgan Lafay. So I suppose with going, I started out with the list of available people that might be interested in taking part. And from that, I tried to create a sound world for that of King Arthur and also for the Green Knight and Bertalak. And to propel the music dynamically, but at the same time, to have some really fun set pieces, the chorus of sprites in the winter that the cassette going and things like that. The gift song of Lady Bertalak, where in three verses she tries to tempt him. And so there are some certain musical show pieces and then there are dances as well. And I think taking my cue from from Monteverdi, who was really the first opera composer, not the very first, but the first successful one. And the reason he succeeded where everyone else hadn't succeeded, everyone else was writing everyone else, Cachini and Perry were writing recited tea, you've just sort of spoken words set to music, but Monteverdi thought that would be deeply boring. So he managed to give a wonderful variety, we'll have a chorus, we'll have a dance, we'll have an aria, we'll have a this, we'll have a that. And there's constant variety and the story of Garwin and the Green Knight really lends itself to that variety of musical approaches. So thinking about how music interprets stories, I was when I was thinking about what I was going to ask you struck me that I'm used to in the world in literature of things being defined by their genre. So I say, hey, we're going to read a western, everybody knows where we're going, if I say we're going to read a horror story, immediately it starts cundering up images. Whereas when I was looking at how music is classified, it tends to be by period or by composer and then you down to numbers. I really know if you listen to Mozart's piano concerto number four, if there is such a thing, I'm guessing, if that's going to be a horror one or a fantasy one at all, it doesn't, it doesn't give it a flavor like that. So how does fantasy work as a theme in in the world of classical music? Is it even recognized as a separate kind of thing that you would do or is it all just lump together if you're in this world of magic and myth. Yes, well, I think that there are sort of two possible answers. The first is where you have a music piece of music with an extra musical idea, namely stage dance or text or nowadays, of course, film. Then the music is actually having equal partner or an unequal partner depending on what the project is. So whereas your Mozart piano concertos are number one to however many, all of Mozart's operas have got descriptive titles. So the magic flute, which is one of the greatest fantasy operas of all time, you know kind of what you're coming to when you come to the magic flute because it's there in the title. And so on the one hand opera or a dramatic piece will will have a title which is the label on the tin if you like the journey that you're buying into. But then many times composers have written pieces of orchestral music, like Rimsky Corsica, Shea Herazard, which is another wonderful fantasy from Arabian nights. And they're the orchestra attempts to paint a picture for you of the world of the Arabian nights and the story of Shea Herazard. That's one of many, many examples. And so composers I think throughout history, particularly since I suppose mid-18th century have been fascinated by fantasy and prior to the 18th century they were fascinated by myth. So if we're not talking so much or narrowing it to fantasy, the most popular subjects for operas in the 17th and 18th centuries were myths from Ovid or Greek myths, Roman myths, and they then had their own fantasy settings. I think it strikes me that music's much fairer in the way it handles fantasy because there's still a little bit of sort of raised eyebrow for many people who like fantasy. And often it's a bit like romantic literature, it's often less well regarded than realism, whatever that means. And people, I think that's why someone like Margaret Atwood tries to redefine it and she calls it speculative fiction instead to get away from this bias. And it seems to me as though the music has never had a problem. It's just another place you might go to find a mood or an influence or an inspiration. I think you're right, but I think depending on the time that you lived in, for example, living at the time of Freud in Vienna and studies in hysteria, the fantasy projects that came up as a result of Freud at that time, I'm thinking particularly of the opera lecturer by Richard Strauss, is a completely different approach to a Greek myth because of because he'd read studies in hysteria and a lecturer is a hysteric and identifiable hysteric. And so a salami has setting of the Oscar Wilde play, completely different from settings of ancient myth beforehand. And I was thinking of something else. Well, yes, in terms of the kind of credibility of fantasy as opposed to realism, I think that many people believe that fantasy is a metaphor, an important metaphor for psychological states of mind and predicaments that human beings find themselves. And when I was writing an opera called Metamorphosis based on Ovid for the centenary of the World College of Music, I was incredibly lucky to be working with Lawrence Vandepost, the South African writer, who personally knew Jung and had written many essays on Jung. And so the reason that I went to him was because I wanted a Jungian approach to Ovid's Metamorphosis and I wanted insights into archetypal characters. And for me, that was much more interesting than writing a piece set in a drawing wrong with somebody with a handbag and a real estate problem or whatever it might be. So for me, fantasy and myth, I think are very rich scenes in a mind that one can delve into to find out truths that are possibly ancient truth, but also to learn about new truths. Yes, here, here, absolutely. So Richard, the most recent piece of yours that I had the privilege to go in here was at the Royal Festival Hall just last month, and that was a very interesting commission, which was setting a diary. It was for the Bach choir and a member of the choir had had COVID very badly at the beginning of the pandemic and was given the diary that was kept of his treatment and recordings of his own things he said during that. And this was handed over to you as a kind of libretto for you to interpret. And what I thought was interesting to talk about in this particular piece is the way it combines. You can't get more real than being on an ICU ward during the COVID pandemic, but it also had elements of the dreams that he was having and the hallucinations he were having, which included some, I think, archetypal images of a poetry and I think it was a golden pair, something like that in it. So that that seems to me like a perfect blend in a way, because our lives are a mixture of both the very real and the very strange and mythical. So tell us a bit more about that project and how that came about. It came up very quickly. I was commissioned by the conductor of the Bach choir, the musical director David Hill, and he said, I've got these diaries. I know Professor Johnston who had this experience. Would you be interested in reading them and seeing if you could write a 16 to 20 minute piece of music. And I looked at the diaries and I thought the answer probably was no, because so much of it was entirely clinical. And I noticed saying we had to give you a tracheotomy last night, and you're kind of thinking how in a hundred years does that set to music. And I think it was only as I think Julia, you were kind of beginning to drive that only when I discovered the sections where he describes his hallucinations himself. I'm sure if experience is that he's having a real or not. And especially he has this vision of a garden that he was taken out into a garden where there was a pedestal with higher glyphs on a very specific image in this garden. And it turned out that only months after he had recovered, he went back to the hospital for a checkup. And he resumed this garden, which he claims he had never been in. And for a mathematician to to to fess up to having had an out of body experience, which defies rational explanation was very hard for him. But the overwhelming feel he had when he came back and was given these diaries, which the nurses had kept and which he had also even in his hallucinations, given entrance to was of love and gratitude to these people who, as he said, just saw me as a bundle of symptoms. And he realized as soon as he was out of the ICU, then someone else was coming in and they would give the same unstinting sacrifice to their endanger to their lives and care to look after the next person and the next and the next. So contrasting that to the, the enthusiastic amateurs where you started with the so going in the green nights. When you've got the bark choir and an orchestra, that's a very different set of tools in your composers toolbox. So could we have a little bit look at the what I think you've I often think in terms of being a writer, you know how you sit down and tackle a subject and break it down into aspects and then think of a storyline going through that. What I picked up as a lay person listening to this is that you start using your orchestra to mimic the sound, the very real sounds of the hospital world with beeping machines. So we're very much in the real world and you've got the choir singing the names. Yes, I mean it was extremely moving because not only were they singing the names in the audience were some of these people which is just so special of the people giving the care. But how do you transition musically from that world of the the loss and the real sounds of an ICU into your garden, which is a place of hallucination and healing. So obviously you're going to head in more lyrical direction so how do tell us this I'm telling I'm speaking too much here tell us from your point of view as a composer what you're doing there, making the building blocks to get you to your destination. Well part of the brief was that it would be only a stream orchestra I say only a string your orchestra was the Philharmonia one of the best string orchestras in the world and they can play pretty much anything you put in front of them. So I decided to begin it and end the piece with this strange texture sort of almost a wheezing texture with a double basis making strange harmonic noises and clicking sounds almost like machines. So knowing that that's where I was starting and where I was going I then had to try to find as I think you were in applying Julia the lyrical heart of the piece which was first of all the fantasy about the garden and then his real visit to the garden much later on. And because however hard I tried the text was very prosaic it's this is not poetry and it was never intended as poetry I hit on an idea which is while the baritone who plays the part of Professor Johnson sings there would be in the fantasy garden and obligato viola solo highly lyrical instrument playing against the more declometry. Music of the baritone and so the viola is actually taking you out of the prosaic world and into the world of poetry and then finally when he's healed and goes to see the garden the viola's music is transformed and then played on a solo violin so it's related to it but it's it's become something different. Oh that's so beautiful and I believe that you've recorded this piece haven't you now so if people wanted to follow up and listen to it when is it likely to be more generally available well i've just approved the second edit with the record company and it should be out in February next year. Okay right so put that in the diary everybody so we've talked about starting a fresh with the subject be it something a story that already exists or interpreting material you're given what about when you're working with a filmmaker and you're being asked to provide the. The heart and the soul of a piece because if you think of famous fantasy films often the very best of them have the most blended tracks and actually what you think of the images along with the music. So you've got is getting it wrong can kill a film i'm sure what what what's your role of doing how do you how do you go about that collaboration. Well it happens in different ways with different directors sometimes i've worked with directors who've been musically very savvy and sometimes they have no idea and they look to me to actually provide some ideas as to the role that the music is getting to play. And for a director giving up their film to a composer is a big deal it's giving up your baby to somebody who you don't really know to say. Bring him or her up look after it and as you rightly say i saw a film the other day which i shouldn't mention its title which was a really decent film and it was killed stone dead by the music so it can be got terribly wrong. On the other hand an indifferent film can actually be made by the score as well it can be rescued and i've been asked several times literally by the producer to to rescue his film because it's it's in trouble it was some TV films that i did. So where do you start i suppose music for film and particularly for fantasy has got several possible roles to play it can be descriptive it can help or hinder the tempo of the film it can speed up the mood of the film. Depending on how the film is cut and very often if a producer says this whole sequence has been cut to slowly the music can compensate by increasing the tempo of it. But much more interestingly than some of those technical things music can actually provide subtext it can provide layers information that is not what you actually see on screen. So a sort of idiotic example is you know the hero and the hero and saying i love you i'll never stop loving you but underneath is some very subverting kind of sinister music which obviously makes you think something's going to go wrong and that's obviously an example that no one would ever dream of doing but the idea of subtext is very exciting indeed. I think everyone must have this experience of if you're watching something that has a scary moment in it if i'm finding it too scary i take the sound off because they just got someone walking through a house. Play the soundtrack with it i was watching there's a new film with Sandra but it called the unforgivable which is a very interesting film about somebody who is has just come out of prison after having killed a law officer as a moment when she's going towards a house i thought oh this is going to go horribly wrong so i muted the sound and it was perfectly watchable with the sound i would be behind the sofa. That's like paying to go on the big dipper and keeping your eyes closed the whole time i completely completely i'm a real scaredy cat when it comes down to it but i think possibly if if i can answer your question with a specific example the most fascinating films that i did was finger smith you're. Yes, the Sarah waters book waters i'm sure will be known to to many of your viewers and i said am i allowed to give a spoiler about what the plot it's been out a number time now yeah i think it has yet so it's told from the perspective of one of the characters and then you realize half of the way through the the narrator changes and you realize that the first character has actually been telling you a load of lies for the whole the first. 150 pages that you've invested your trust in this character and then you're not sure who's telling the truth was is it the second or eight or all the first so the director Ashley war was brilliant Irish director said that you have got to do everybody with the music and give them. And give them information that makes us believe this about this character and this and this and this and this and then halfway through we're going to pull the rug out under their feet and we're going to realize that they've been led up the garden path and that was such a fun project to do actually literally manipulating your audience in the best possible way. Yeah well it's it's for the it's totally justified by the context there isn't it your part of the storytelling exactly yes so thinking of all the famous fantasy films that have been out over the last. Five six decades is there any particular soundtracks that you think stand out musically as part of the storytelling. Well I suppose if you allow westerns to be part of fantasy which I think they are and make your pitch will decide once upon a time in the west said you lioni with score by any amoricony is one of the most extraordinary imaginative films particularly with the use of whistling one of the car boys has a theme that he's always whistling just so sinister. So very often you you hear the whistle without even seeing the character and you have this sort of creepy feeling that something is going is going to happen. That's brilliant there are obviously examples like Howard Shaw's Lord of the Rings which just a wonderful rich warm fantasy score as you'd expect cinema paradisos possibly you could regard that as a fantasy film again by any amoricony who I was very privileged to work with. On a feature film called City of Joy he wrote half the score and I wrote the other half and cinema paradiso is is all about literally a young boys young child fantasy I'm sure many of your viewers know it and living in the wonderful escape of the fantasy world of the cinema in Italy. So once again Morricony because he's a brilliant tunesmith can create melodies that span huge arcs of the film and have such nostalgia and sub sweetness and he characterizes by melody whereas many other composers don't have that gift and they characterize by heavy brass section or lots of percussion or strong rhythms but Morricony is a genius with melody. Have you ever been part of a project where you've been handed on a sort of key key signature tune or so I'm thinking of the Harry Potter sequence which began with the John Williams music but then they changed. I think Patrick Doyle I did quite a few of them yes opposed as involved as well yes so he's inherited a kind of style which he's had to then reinterpret. I mean the films also change in tone as well so he he is given more room but have you ever had to do that where you take on an existing tune and. No it's never happened just the way the cookie crumbles yeah I've had to do that as a writer where I've been asked to write something in an existing scheme and it's quite it's an interesting challenge because you're. You're sort of wearing other people's clothes to a certain extent but trying to walk out as if they're yours yes. I definitely quoted things before and for example wild mountain time a beautiful German adaptation of a Rosman culture story her novel of the same name well mountain time and so we had to have the the folk tune and I loved it so much I did loads of variations of it and then sort of turned it inside out so perhaps that's likely what you're talking about yes yeah. So we always end our podcast with asking our guest where is the best place in a fancy world to go for something we've done forests and hospital was best place to be ill was one of them. But in your honor I thought we would do where is the best place to be a composer this is not the performing side of it is being the composing side of it you can put yourself into any fantasy context from the beginning of storytelling to the present day have you got an answer for me Richard. I've got a place in mind but I'm not sure I'm a being the rules that it's a fantasy place because it's a real place well I could turn it into a not real place so I've always loved cathedrals and especially cloisters for some reason I've always been attracted to cloisters and my favorite cloister in the world is Montréal in the incredible cathedral in Palermo in Sicily. And I think I've visited it two or three times and literally walking around and round and round or hours on end that that cloister in some ways has been a wonderful release of all sorts of good creative thoughts as had many other cloisters. So I think if I'm allowed to have that one that would be it but otherwise I'd create a fantasy cloister probably gothic and with a lovely tree in the fountain in the middle of it. You can probably sneak yourself into many many a fantasy trilogy or out there that's set in these worlds I'm sure it's familiar location. I thought if this I've got sort of one silly one and one serious one so my serious one is the name of the wind by practice rofus which Patrick rofus which has a real emphasis on music making in it so that's a serious place to be a composer. But I then did think it might be quite fun to be the composer who provides the music for the bar scene in Star Wars in the first of the films that were made with a very famous weird but spacey music. I thought it would be nice to be the guy out the back with the alien head and the nose who's actually composing that music for the button. The jazz band play I imagine they're actually doing a bit of their own riffs if we did but know the culture. So the composer for that bar would be a great fun place to be and you know have a perspective on the universe. I've often wondered what music might be like 500 years from now or on a different planet and I've always loved that scene in Star Wars I didn't know what you mean. So there was so much more to talk about Richard but thank you so much for letting us think a little bit about storytelling through music and your relationship between the telling of fantasy stories and the world of cinema and TV composing. And so thank you for being with us and thank you everyone for listening. It's a pleasure. Thank you Julia. Thanks for listening to MythMakers Podcast. Brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. 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