N.B. underlined titles indicate works that are available from http://www.scoreexchange.com/   The composer This is an account of a man, and more to the point of his music, which may not be expected to grace the pages of a journal such as Classical Music since it is about an amateur ex-composer who has not been overtly successful. It is written by someone who can claim an insight greater than anyone else's into the music under discussion, and hopefully with wise critical judgment, derived from hindsight, as to the merit or otherwise of each work. It is written with honesty and humour: it should be clear now and then that the tongue is in the cheek, or the trumpet is to the lips. Nevertheless every phrase is sincere, and some salient points are made along the way. I do not know when I began to compose: I have heard music (some of which is my own) in my head for as long as I can remember. I started writing down compositions at the age of seven, and continued until the proverbial stream dried up in the mid-1980's, when I was approaching 30. Traumatic as this cessation was at the time, I have since come to regard it as the inevitable result of the increasing difficulty I found in producing music and my increasing dissatisfaction with the results of my labours and lack of performance opportunities. It was unfortunate that in my formative years I failed to find a source of encouragement for the sort of music that it was in my nature to write. In the early and mid 1970's, the contemporary music scene was still dominated by the plinky-plonkers, a term which on the one hand onomatopoeically describes much of their so-called "music", and on the other reflects the firm belief of many of them that methods such as total serialism, randomness and their opposites represented the only ways forward for music. In fact, it is largely attributable to luck whether or not the results of such methods are aurally recognisable as music. Admittedly the term "music" means different things to different people. My attempt at definition is "an aesthetically pleasing succession of sounds", given that each individual has his own perception of aesthetic pleasure. Such an environment was hardly conducive to a composer whose works tend to sound as if they could have been written at various times during the last 250 or so years. It is important to realise that I have never indulged in pastiche. Whatever influences impinge on each work, the ultimate style is always my own. In those works which mostly sound of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, there are passages (a particular juxtaposition of harmonies, perhaps) which would not have occurred unless the music had been composed in recent times. This is music of its time, for all time, and in the 1970's was ahead of its time. There is no reason why the style should be unacceptable in this more enlightened era. What style is this, one may ask? My experience suggests that a “born” or “natural” composer has his own innate style, which may absorb by largely intuitive and subconscious methods elements of any music he hears or otherwise studies. When I was very young, most of the music I heard was light music of the twentieth century or classical music of the previous two centuries (N.B. it was only in the twentieth century, since classical composers began exploring harmonic and a- harmonic languages inappropriate to light music, that the two have become divorced). These are the only stylistic influences on the music I wrote before the age of about 17, and all my best works are firmly rooted in these traditions, whether or not the twentieth century impinges. For example, there is very little in the Festal March or the Symphony-Suite that is not derived from these sources, and nineteenth century music provides the foundations for the Romance for viola and piano and the piano Polonaise, although neither work could have been written in the nineteenth century. The polonaise, for instance, is sparked off by a harmonic disruption that would have been inconceivable one hundred years before its composition. The first note of the piece is A natural, and the first chord A minor: the ensuing dissonant upheaval is explained at bar 6, when the A is displaced downwards to the correct note A flat, the dominant of the work’s key. Every good rule has its exception. I do not recall encountering ragtime before my teens, yet one of my potentially greatest hits (my best selling work at time of writing) is an almost traditional, Joplinesque rag. Autumn Sunshine is the only work of mine that could work as a jazz band number, in which form it could be as exciting as in its piano solo format. A curious side effect of the subconscious absorption of influences is the way in which themes I have heard and then forgotten have occasionally emerged in my works. This causes one to doubt whether other themes in one’s works are one’s own! The first two manifestations occurred in piano pieces composed when I was about ten, which turned out to be variations on Eric Coates’ Dambusters’ March and the motto theme of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 5. Whatever the presence of themes from Schubert’s Piano Sonata in B flat and one of Rossini’s best known overtures may suggest, I was not familiar with these works when I composed a Sonata in A minor in 1973! The most remarkable surprise of this kind I have had was in the mid-1980’s when, on attending a performance of Crusell’s Clarinet Concerto in F minor, I discovered that in 1978 I had turned the main theme of its slow movement into a polonaise. As I matured, I listened to and assimilated elements of a far wider range of music, including classical and other styles of the twentieth century. As a result, i began to write in more modern idioms, with a more flexible approach to harmony and dissonance. One guiding maxim was always the “just listening test”: I aimed to produce only pieces to which, regardless of whether or not they were aware of their compositional processes, a lot of people might enjoy listening. Of course, each pair of ears has a different range of styles that it is prepared to accept. I wrote several pieces that would be written off at bar one by those who believe decent music finished about the time of Grieg! On the other hand, those who enjoy listening to (say) Boulez or Ferneyhough, unless they have very open minds, will probably find all my work unbearably simplistic and out of date. With this greater awareness of more recent music came a growing awareness of musical forms, and improved discipline in my craftsmanship, especially in my use of themes. When I was young, it was pointed out to me that I had a tendency to waste ideas by developing them little if at all. Whilst my critics were right, one should beware of going to the other extreme. How many boring works have resulted from composers’ attempts to derive long pieces from the sometimes sparse contents of their opening bars? This is why, in my ‘Cello concerto, based on the ideas presented in its first couple of minutes, I introduce a new theme in the scherzo, and clear the decks with an intermezzo on different themes before the work enters its final stages. Adopting a special discipline can be a fascinating exercise, as in my untitled D major adagio for piano, in which one friend detected the influence of Stravinsky. In this I use only the notes of the scale of D major, plus G sharp in the first half of the piece and C natural in the second. The whole five minutes or so is derived from the opening statement of an arpeggio leading to a chord, followed by a turn-like figure and some stepwise movements. The outcome includes a surprisingly large amount of dissonance and resolution. continued

Not the Classical Music Repertoire Guide to the works of     IAN CARMALT (1956 - )   A compositional autobiography by The Composer