Musical influences on Philip Goddard's music & literary works

What I came more recently to understand was that such troubled and intense experiences that emerge in certain composers' works are generally drawn from what I call primary archetypes, and at least generally not from specific past life experiences at all. Please follow the latter link for an explanation.

Later on, I listened to a small number of other works of Aho, and again that primary archetype quality showed up in various places. From the small number of his works I'd listened to, and what I've read about his oeuvre overall, I get the impression that he may have been well aware that what I identify as primary archetype material in his music was a problematical and potentially disturbing / troublesome element that he needed to get away from, at least some of the time — not least for his own mental health —, and that would presumably then be his prime motivation for his incursions at times away from that sort of material in some of his later works.

Whereas Rued Langgaard (see further below) tended to regard his most deeply sourced and inspired music as being in his 'demonic' idiom (probably with some primary archetype input, but anyway disturbing to him), and took refuge from it in a fairly 'retro' wayward neo-Romantic idiom, Aho appears to have sought an uneasy refuge in 'post-modernism' (whatever that's supposed to mean) and experimentation with polystylistic approaches — none of what little I heard made any convincing impression on me.

However, doing some spot checks through his later symphonies at the present time on YouTube, from my perspective he sounds very stuck in a dark and very troubled inner scenario, with a fair amount of musical 'narrative' that seems to me to be largely contrived from his ordinary 'mind' rather than allowed to flow naturally from his deeper aspects. What I listened to undoubtedly sounded mighty impressive, at least at various points, with many compelling dramatic gestures, but I had the impression over and over that he was struggling to 'express himself' i.e., emotionally, so that for me the effect pretty quickly became tedious and fatiguing.

As to how a composer, or indeed anyone else, could reduce the impact of primary archetypes in their own lives and artistic creations, and potentially minimize it to near-zero, this is possible for sufficiently motivated, aware and mentally focused people, using insights and methods that I give on my Clarity of Being website. Please see Understanding archetypes — and clearing ourselves of them. The methods have worked well for me and for various other people. They don't seem able to completely close one's connection to those archetypes, however, but basically one can clean up those connections (progressively eliminate one's attachment to them), so they no longer colour one's life experience, and only pop up (transiently) when one is directly reminded of them, such as upon hearing my Symphony 3 or Aho's Symphony 4. It's important for one's own mental health to take that clearance measure if one possibly can.

Regarding possible influences that I got from Aho's works, my impression was and is that of having gained a general educational input from what I've heard — observing the disturbing nature of his primary archetype based music and being clear that significantly listening to that work would be taking me to places that are not only disturbing but would be harmful for my mental health. Equally important was my observing how he appeared on occasion to be seeking to take refuge in what seemed to me to be relatively ineffective musical idioms in order to try to shake off the troublesome archetype influence — an example I empathized with but didn't want to follow.

Symphony 4

… One work of mine that I did think of as something of a homage to Alain was my very short Tune in a Stained Glass Window, where I deliberately added the odd Alain touches. Also, in certain of my works some movement titles were, or were adapted from, the titles of Alain's Trois Danses for organ. Another such work is Fallen Soldiers, which I openly regarded as my little memorial to Alain.

Organ works, including:

• Intermezzo

  If you listen to this you'll no doubt notice that the scurrying passagework figures sound very indistinct and confused. This is clearly an effect intended by the composer, giving the music an intensely mysterious quality, because those passagework lines are actually hemiolas, with three-against-two eighth-notes. Presumably very difficult to play well.

  A mysterious and menacing motif at one point in my Symphony 3, which I always thought of as 'like the devil breathing', appears to have originated from my remembering a motif in this piece — but here it sounds just mysterious, whereas what really made my use of it sound devilish was my underpinning it by use of the augmented triad, repeatedly resolving to a minor triad a whole tone lower.

  The aforementioned mysterious and indeed rather eerie hemiola may well have been a prompt for me to bring in a rather similarly scurrying hemiola into the choral section of the third movement of my Symphony 4 (Highland Wilderness), accompanying the improvisations on the pallbearers' song. This gives very much an impression of the plod, plod, plod of the pallbearers being within a wider context (namely, the expanse of Rannoch Moor and thereabouts, and all its historical events). Towards the end of this excerpt — the beginning of the choral section of my Symphony 4's second movement — you can hear the hemiola start up, immediately suggestive of a multiplicity of somehow intriguing details all around.

• Trois Danses

  This was my introduction to the music of Jehan Alain. I felt such a strong connection with the idiom of this, that I quickly began to suspect that I might have been Alain in my previous incarnation — though my more recently-gained insights make anything like that look to be extremely unlikely, and point to a quite different explanation of that connection — i.e., the overlapping, or 'partially common', deep level 'idiom' templates of his and mine.

• Suite Pour Orgue

• Prélude et Fugue

  This unique and arresting piece is particularly disturbing, with an intensely haunted and tormented quality, which to me seems to be strongly associated with experiences connected with Satanism / 'dark practices'.

  I'm not at all suggesting that Alain was into such things himself, but he was an extremely aware and sensitive person who would readily pick up intense musical impressions out of some of the primary archetypes, just as I was unwittingly doing. There's no shortage of virulent primary archetype material relating to horrendous experiences that people and whole communities have struggled through or indeed been completely overwhelmed by, that came about from involvement in occultism in its most extreme and 'dark' manifestations.

• Prelude and Fugue in A Minor (piano transcription)

• Ditto, on organ

  This tremendous prelude and fugue I got to know through my father playing the Liszt piano arrangement of it on the piano at home. When I eventually heard a radio broadcast of the organ version (i.e., played on the organ), I found it greatly disappointing despite the grandeur of sound, because the internal details of the music were much more difficult to pick out — particularly in the fugue. With a home piano, not only do you not have obscuring reverberation, but the performer can clarify dense textures by emphasizing particular melodic lines and even individual leading notes, in a way that you can't do on an organ, and can bring out the vividness of the music with some expression — something you can't really do on an organ.

• Toccata in C Minor (on piano)

  Ditto, organ version

  Same comments apply here as for the A Minor Prelude and Fugue.

• The Art of Fugue (on piano)

  My father often played the first Contrapunctus of this on the piano, but I don't remember hearing him playing any more of it. Maybe he had the score only of that one section.

  Although I never gave a lot of attention to Bach until late in my adulthood, I always felt that there was something very special about this particular music — as though that piece was tip of an iceberg that would reveal great splendours for whoever investigated further. — And how true that impression eventually turned out to be!

  Please note that the YouTube video linked to above has wrong links given for jumping to the different sections, but if you scroll down a little you'll find in the top comment a correct list of the sections, including their start-time links.

  My choice of recording here reflects my own distaste for most pianists' spoiling the music by imparting gratuitously excessive rubato and 'expression' into it. This is a problem I have with professional pianists generally in 'serious' classical music, including at least most of the real big-name pianists. It baffles me that all those so-highly regarded pianists have so little sensitivity to the music they're playing, that they regularly maul it so — instead of acting as vehicles for bringing out the composer's own full intentions to best advantage — and that the majority of people actually prefer such performances!

  The oh-so-popular Angela Hewitt, on the other hand, tends to play the piano as though it's a harpsichord, in a manner that I find dull and pedestrian, not sufficiently bringing out the clarifying and expressive dynamics as one can on a piano.

  This particular performance, by Pierre-Laurent Aimard, sounds to me to get it about right, adding 'expression' only as is necessary to transparently reveal Bach's likely intentions to best effect, while keeping all lines and entries not only clear but meaningful, in exemplary fashion.

• Goldberg Variations (on piano)

  This was in fact the only Bach work that touched me during my teens to the extent that I regarded it as one of my definite 'likes'. I got to know it through my father battling through it on the piano.

  One trouble about this work's extreme likeability is that concert pianists almost universally maul it by imparting oodles of their own personal 'expression', which made it a real challenge for me to find a recorded performance where the pianist had been properly 'transparent'.

  The Jeremy Denk performance I link to here fits my bill particularly well. He takes the work rather faster than other performances I've heard, but that's in the context that I've found most other performances I've heard to be too lingering and wallowing, and so being deficient in sense of shape and direction. Denk, far from losing anything important in his faster speed, plays with an absolutely beautiful delicacy and sensitivity, bringing out all the details and phrasing in the course of continuing to move on, so you get a much stronger sense of the structural integrity of the music, and its direction — the expressiveness being more of an objective, 'universal' one than the other pianists I've heard achieved — and it moves me in a way that the 'wallowers' could never do.

• St John Passion

  I got to know this impressive choral work pretty well through being a bass-section singer in a few local choral society performances of it.

• St Matthew Passion

  I never sang in that, and just heard it on the radio a couple of times. What struck me was that in musical and dramatic terms it seemed more diffuse and less memorable than the St John Passion, despite containing some ravishingly beautiful and inspiring music. However, I did pick up the Passion Chorale from this work, to use in an apparently unique and hauntingly moving arrangement (with my own words) in my choral work Et in Arcadia Ego.

  If you want to hear that Passion Chorale setting without having to navigate through Et in Arcadia Ego, you're in luck because it's in a short 'taster' work I extracted from that: Dies Irae and Chorale.

• Magnificat
  

  Another Bach work I did sing in several times. The recording I've selected here is at about the speed I'm accustomed to singing it. I note that many other recordings are of slower performances that have more of an easy-going 'generic Bach jogging-along' speed, but at the faster speed this work really shines and has a beautiful energy — though very good ensemble is required for the lines and phrases to stand out properly, but then again, that challenge lifts the whole experience out of the commonplace and comfortable into something more uplifting and invigorating.

• Romanian Christmas Carols (piano)

• Sonatina (piano)

• Romanian Folk Dances (piano)

• Out of Doors (piano)

• Mikrokosmos, vol. 5 (piano)

  My father really struggled with these pieces, but I loved their sound — something so joyful and life-affirming!

• Suite, Op. 14 (piano)

  When my father sometimes played this (always with difficulty), I actually assumed it was something by Debussy, and really liked this sterner face of that composer! It wasn't till my early adulthood that I found out who the real composer was.

• Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta

• Concerto for Orchestra

  I always had mixed feelings about this work, in that for me the nature of the different movements didn't hang together properly to make a satisfying whole. I was okay with the first three movements (very effective), but the fourth and especially final movement felt to me to be rather a let-down, seeming not to be a particularly effective continuation of the thread established in the first three movements.

  Anyhow, this is one of the various music works that I honoured by partially quoting from it (movement 1) briefly in my Symphony 5 (Magritte Gallery).

  Also, the contrasting chorale theme in movement 2 of this concerto was hovering over me when I wrote the first (full) statement of the chorale element of my Symphony 2 (Idyll, Chorale and Dance). Although my chorale sounds pretty different, I did pay a little homage to Bartok's chorale in the unexpected change of key in it, which for me in both works is a priceless and somehow particularly meaningful touch.

• The Miraculous Mandarin

  An amazing work, actually ballet music, breathtaking in its savage earthiness. Just listen to the opening of the recording linked to here (portraying the traffic and bustle outside a city brothel)!

• Bluebeard’s Castle

  One of the most powerful operas in the repertoire — an amazing and, for many, ultimately a tear-jerking experience! Beautifully evocative music, revealing a degree of authenticity of its inner vision / experience that puts to shame all the Italian grand opera repertoire of which I'm aware.

  However, my understanding nowadays is that its particularly strong effect for me and many people comes from primary archetype material that Bartok had connected with, via the libretto by Béla Balázs, so it's not a healthy work to be listening to a lot — especially for sensitive and aware individuals.

• Cantata Profana (The Nine Enchanted Stags)

  A little-known unique piece for double choir and orchestra — pungently powerful and evocative. Must be tremendously thrilling to sing in! There's a mysterious profundity in this stern idiom that reminds me considerably of Stravinsky's King of the Stars.

• Eroica Variations in E-flat major, Op 35 (piano)

  My father went through a phase of playing (aka 'struggling with') this, and then it was rather confusing to hear something like this in the (orchestral) final movement of Beethoven's Symphony 3!

• Moonlight Sonata Op.27 No.2 (piano)

  I'm not sure if I heard my father attempt to play this, but I heard bits of it — primarily the first movement — on occasions from an early age. However, I've NEVER before heard it played as on this astonishing recording I discovered on the day of writing this note. This, to my own sensibility, at last conveys the work as Beethoven himself would surely have meant it to be heard, in a way that at least most of the great-name professional pianists fail to because they maul whatever music they play to show off their own self-importance as great-name pianists!

  Ignore the age of the pianist and just allow yourself to listen to at least relatively authentic Beethoven!

• Symphonies (all) — especially:

  • Symphony 3 (Eroica)

  • Symphony 5

  • Symphony 6 (Pastoral Symphony)

    This was the first orchestral / symphonic work that I got acquainted with, thanks to my class teacher while I was still in primary school. One day he played just the third and fourth movements of this symphony several times to my class, enthusing about how vivid was the musical picture painting, so it really came to life for me — the village-green dance with memorable tune, which eventually is brought to a halt by a thunderstorm.

    Subsequently the first two movements always seemed beckoningly eerie, because of the hidden menace of the peacefulness of nature preceding the storm that I knew was coming up just a bit later.

  • Symphony 7

  • Symphony 9 (Choral Symphony)

    Although this symphony contains brilliant and tremendously inspiring music, I've never felt that its four movements hang together very well, as compared with his other symphonies. On the other hand I got more direct connection with it, through singing in it (in the choir's bass section) on two occasions with Exeter University Choral Society. Undoubtedly it was thrilling (and challenging!) to sing in it. For those who don't know the symphony, only the last of the four movements is choral, so the choir has to sit patiently through the first three movements.

• Piano Concerto 1

  I got to know this quite well when I was young, in the form of a solo piano reduction of it that my father kept struggling through bits of. There was one rather mysterious moment in the whole work that somehow meant something special to me, and I always waited for it. It was in the first movement, being the culmination of a section of rather mysterious-sounding bold key modulations, in this recording coming at about 8'30 in the displayed score, with some mysterious-sounding quiet piano chord motifs.

  Of course, what this monkey eventually did with chords anything like those wasn't then to provide a nice dramatic resolution into some grand major key as Beethoven did, but to hold onto the particular chords and wallow in sound worlds based on them, which I guess even a wild one like dear Ludwig Van would have viewed as insane! Yes, I'm a musical hippopotamus!

• Missa Solemnis

  I didn't get to know this mega-work till about 1979 or 1980, when Exeter University Choral Society, of which I was a member, took it on to learn and perform. An amazing and terrifyingly difficult piece for amateur choirs to take on, but so thrilling and uplifting! Regardless of it being notionally a religious work, it was such an affirmation of all that is positive in human nature — at least, as long as one didn't take the words of the Roman Catholic Mass as representing any genuine truth or indeed as anything other than for disregarding! In other words, it was the music, not the religion that was so positive in effect.

  As with all the works I sang in during my many years of choral society involvement, I learnt all sorts of things from really getting inside the music through performing it. This was all laying down foundations for my eventually producing my own public compositions.

• Violin Concerto

  This is the only work I know* that uses the largely pretty sterile 'serial' system AND still sounds deeply human and brings not just me but many people to tears. However, its real coup is its use near the end, of J.S. Bach's Es ist Genug chorale melody, which in that context has a powerful emotional effect.

  * No, not quite. Berg's opera Wozzek is another to a fair extent. The only thing is, I found that a full-length opera in that idiom got tedious for me — the tear-jerking ending being just about all I could remember.

  Although I don't think of the Violin Concerto, or Berg's music generally, as having much relevance to my own, this work does have relevance to the second of my novels — Dead Pigs. In that novel I bring in references to this work and its use of the particular Bach chorale, where Ben is agonizing over the brutal lynching of the family's pet pig. The concerto's dedication — 'To the memory of an angel' — is an important link there. It's very characteristic of my literary works that a playful wayward humour runs through the various dark and troublesome events!

• Symphonie Fantastique

  Quite apart from this symphony being fantastically strange and brazenly dramatic, and earning my deep gratitude to 'Uncle Hector' for all that, his particular use of the Dies Irae chant tune in this work was what predisposed me (as it had no doubt predisposed other composers too) to use it myself when I got composing.

  However, whereas some other composers, such as Rachmaninov, tended to be haunted by it and to bring it into various works as some sort of doom or fear-of-death motif, in my case I made it the ironic primary musical basis of my choral work Et in Arcadia Ego*, and also, humorously, I allowed it to appear briefly at one point in the fourth tableau of The Great Wilderness, my big organ cycle — and nowhere else.

  * In Et in Arcadia Ego most of my serene canonic renderings of the Berlioz-remembered Dies Irae chant have an immensely, hauntingly sublime quality, the like of which I've not heard elsewhere — an effect that I didn't hear until I'd put the parts together and played the result back and was then quite awestruck.

  Indeed, that can be said of the serene chordal renderings too, though there the sound is very different, and there seems to be something with exceptionally special (and haunting) meaning about the way the tuba is used towards the end of those sections. If you haven't yet heard Et in Arcadia Ego, I strongly recommend you to take a full listen and see what I mean. This sure is music that tells stories beyond any subtext that I've yet thought of…

• Grand Messe des Morts (Requiem)

  I had the awe-inspiring experience of singing in this mega-work (as a bass-section choir member) on one occasion in Exeter Cathedral. One doesn't need religion at all to find this work, along with others of its ilk, to be powerfully effective as a sort of huge musical folk-drama.

… A strange thing is the way that most of the orchestral works contain episodes that in some ways sound remarkably like Berlioz (though actually not exactly like Berlioz but like Berwald sounding strangely like Berlioz ) — but Berwald, being roughly contemporary with Mendelssohn, pre-dates Berlioz, and my own 'reading' of the situation is that there was no significant influence of the former on the latter, even if Berlioz were aware of Berwald's music, but rather, both composers were drawing upon slightly overlapping 'idiom' templates in composing their works.

• Symphony 2 (Sinfonie Capricieuse)

• Symphony 3 (Sinfonie Singulière)

… In that sort of idiom the incisiveness and more bell-like quality of the piano sound works much better for me than an orchestra or choir — though it still needs 'non-romantic' playing to gain any Brownie points from me! In other words, as with Bach, the need is NOT to impart a lot of the player's 'expression' into the music, but for the player to be sensitive to the composer's intentions (which can be more than or even different from the score markings, which latter may be from a rather uncomprehending publisher rather than composer), and do no more than bring those intentions out to best effect.

• Piano Sonata No.3 in F Minor

• 4 Ballades, Op. 10

• Two Rhapsodies, Op. 79

• Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel

• Symphony 1 (Gothic Symphony)

  A monstrously big and powerful symphony, record-breaking (sic) for a symphony, both in length and forces required. The final three of its six movements are choral. I never had the opportunity to sing in this, as its huge scale ensures that it's very rarely performed. Apart from 'The Gothic' (a real ten-star experience!), I've never really got on with what I've heard of this composer's music, much as I've wanted to.

  There's a transient echo of the 'sound and feel' of a moment or two somewhere in this symphony at one point in my Symphony 5 (Magritte Gallery), but that's pretty definitely nothing to do with Havergal Brian's work, for my music was following its own quite tight logic and dream-like narrative at that point, and the 'Gothic Symphony echo' must have been completely fortuitous, even though in a fair number of other places there I did deliberately include humorous transient quotes and allusions from other composers' works.

• War Requiem

  I had the great fortune to sing (in the bass section of the choir) in this big and thrilling work on three well-separated occasions, each in Exeter Cathedral. For an amateur choir, including me, it's terrifyingly but inspiringly 'challenging' (i.e., difficult!) to perform.

  Through getting to know the work pretty intimately, I was aware of two ('nudge'-type) strong musical influences, though one of them remained a potential because I finished my ten years of composing before I could use it in anything.

  The latter was the incredibly beautiful fugal Recordare chorus, which I had an ongoing urge to use in a particular composition in which it would be used almost 'as is', except that it would be in a different mode, and therefore have a quite different sound (and of course any words would also be different), and it would extend and develop completely differently. I tend to hear that so clearly that I've little doubt that this isn't about a desire to imitate but is drawn from a template that deeper levels of consciousness have been seeking to point me to for a very worthwhile new composition.

  The other 'influence' had one of the really big practical effects for me. That was the In Paradisum chorus that leads on from the 'Let us sleep now' duet towards the end of the work. Through singing in the work and getting to know it pretty intimately, I was deeply fascinated by the means by which Britten had produced the strange and extremely beautiful mush of choral sound out of which various strands at times emerged with strong effect, then to submerge again while others similarly temporarily came into focus.

  What we had in that In Paradisum was a multi-part canon using a modal melodic line that moved mostly in small intervals. That ensured that at any point you had a mush of gentle dissonance, but the overall sound was still beautiful and harmonious because those dissonances were resolving into consonances too, just as the consonances were then falling back into gentle scrunches.

  I thought this was something worth trying at some point in a composition, but then my hand was forced like the figurative bolt from the blue — a sequence of events that I'd never even dreamt might happen for me.

  On the first evening of 1997, while I was in the midst of composing the final (choral) movement of my Symphony 6 (K2 — A Song of Striving and Adventure), and also about two-thirds-way through reading the first book on Buddhism I'd ever read (The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying), I thought to break off from the composing for a few minutes and experimentally look within myself and see if I could yet perceive my inner 'buddha nature', which the author of that book said was the fundamental nature of each one of us.

  What happened then was that I immediately became enlightened! Yes, in the strictest sense as understood in Buddhism and various other Eastern traditions. I recount and explain about that in 'Spiritual' enlightenment — Personal experience, clarifications, tips.

  So, once I'd notionally completed my Symphony 6, no more than a couple of weeks after my becoming enlightened, I was wondering how I could reflect that change of my perceptions in my further compositions.

  What came to the rescue and prevented any mental logjam occurring then was, of all things, my dear fridge-freezer! No, NOT joking — dead(ly) serious, it really was my fridge-freezer that effectively told me what I needed to do then!

  Its particular sound included a predominant fairly quiet rather harmonious scrunchy hum, and that caught my attention, and seemed to resonate within my mindspace, and I started hearing it as two bass choir sections singing or chanting melodic lines in canon, which were weaving in whole tone intervals around the pitch of that scrunchy hum — and also I was hearing on top of that, at about mid-soprano pitch, a beautiful modal melodic line, ascending or descending, and moving only in whole and half-tones.

  So, bang! — No, that wasn't the fridge-freezer exploding, but me suddenly commencing (i.e., initially just as an idle bit of experimentation, without a further symphony in mind at all) the composition of what rapidly became my haunting and truly unique Symphony 7 (eventually subtitled Ancient Cry for Freedom).

  Surely nobody will hear any Benjamin Britten or indeed fridge-freezer in that work! If anything, the opening has perhaps a suggestion of Arvo Pärt, albeit independently sourced (from a very strong and powerful deep-level template), and indeed the music soon develops in a very different way from anything of his. If there was any genuine audible 'influence', it would have been a generalized one from early Western church music, though that could have been at most only a base-line influence.

  Most of my subsequent choral works used at least some degree of similarly layered canonic structuring, though (off the top of my head) I don't think I ever again used the scrunchy basses down at the bottom*. Doing the latter at all often would lose full effect as it would sound more like a cliché. My works were experiments, and thus I moved on from each to try something different — an approach that is light-years away from the consistently sweet but tiresomely self-imitative output of Alan Hovhaness (see further below).

  * I guess the nearest I got to that was the multi-part canonic sections in the sublime Et in Arcadia Ego — the difference there being that the scrunches occur here and there in all the choir parts, not just the lower ones — and the sound of those scrunches is even more hair-raisingly, emotively, beautiful, and suggestive of something urgently important that is in some way seeking to reveal itself to us.

  In addition to the two specifically musical nudges from the War Requiem, I also got a very strong literary nudge, for I was immensely moved by Britten's powerful setting of Wilfred Owen's poem The Parable of the Old Man and the Young in this work (it still draws up my tears every time), and I used it with searing power in my sixth novel, Forbidden Flood Warning. I'm not letting on as to how I used it there, except that the hard-hitting (read 'shocking'! ) acidic and earthy humour in its immediate context makes it all the more telling.

  Also, my short(ish) story Madonna With Child includes a scene involving a performance of this work.

• Rejoice in the Lamb

  I sang in this wonderful touchingly humorous choral work a number of times, being strongly amused and touched by the reference to my cat Jeoffry (note the unusual spelling). — The latter so strongly indeed (no doubt a deep-level template involved), that I gave Jeoffry the cat a new 'owner' by the name of Geronwy Bishop, no, not in a music work, but in my sixth novel — Forbidden Flood Warning, where Jeoffry is every bit a star of the story as is the sunny and amiable 'Gron' in that bitingly humorous satire upon fanatical religion and its inevitable outcomes and consequences.

• Missa Brevis

  Breathtakingly beautiful, and unique among all music I've listened to.

• Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings

  If I remember correctly, I first heard this on old shellac 78rpm records, when I was probably about nine or ten, something around 1948/50. It sounds just as bizarrely quirky to me today as it did then — but that quirkiness is a truly beautiful and endearing one, so I don't at all mean that as a criticism. The stipulation in the score of a natural, as distinct from valve, horn was a touch of real brilliance. How I'd love to hear more instruments in natural tunings, with all the fascinating and potentially emotive microtonal intervals that they produce!

  Indeed I'd say, what a pity that I have higher priorities nowadays than music composition, and also don't have the financial resources, to compose for instruments in just or mean-tone tuning systems! People have no idea what they're missing through their fixation on the convenient and utilitarian equal temperament system.

• Peter Grimes

• Curlew River

  Both the above two operas gave me images that I used in my second novel, Dead Pigs. In the case of Peter Grimes it was the searching lynch mob calling out 'Peter Grimes! Peter Grimes!", and in Curlew River it was the 'madwoman' kneeling at the grave of her dead boy, whose spirit appears above the grave to comfort / reassure her. In the latter case the scene was transformed (within a dream) into the immensely sad and weary Ben kneeling at the grave of Alice, the lynched (and thus very dead) family pet pig, and looking up to behold a joyfully grunting spirit of Alice above the grave, complete with an oh-so-familiar snot dangling from her left nostril.

  My mischievous and earthy sense of humour had far less opportunities for expression in my music works!

… Although Debussy is generally regarded as the great champion user of that scale, we need to remember that another great and tellingly effective user of that scale, at least in his later years, was Leoš Janáček. For more about the latter, see further below.

• Nocturnes

  Certainly (still) one of my favourite Debussy orchestral works. Its final movement (Sirènes) has a women's choir part, and in my early years of visiting the Scottish Highlands and walking on the mountains and out over Rannoch Moor, long before I started composing my public works, some of the musical improvisations in my mind as I walked, especially on and close to Rannoch Moor, were based on Sirènes, and seemed particularly haunting and associated with that area.

  When I eventually composed my Symphony 4 (Highland Wilderness), I used a wordless choir (SATB) in the second of the three movements. Although it was a mixed choir, there were sections where the women were given a notionally 'Sirènes' sort of role, but it worked out differently because* it was in an extended section of overall hemiola in the orchestra with scurrying four-notes-against-three in a gentle 6/8 pulse marking the steady plod of my walking along rough tracks and up steep mountain gradients out there on the great Rannoch Moor. And in any case, all the signs are that this was another case of Debussy composing from some templates that overlap with ones that are in my own deeper aspects.

  * Actually there was also something else to its origin. The first intimations of that choral passage came to me during a hike on Dartmoor, in southern England in about 1982, some 15 years before any now extant symphony of mine had even been thought of, when I heard in my mind a wordless men's choir, with no hint or thought of Debussy or Sirènes.

  I heard it so strongly and it felt so meaningful that it had me mystified and intrigued, as though I were picking up on some past-life experience, and I associated it particularly with an area of the south part of the particularly wild and remote northern section of high Dartmoor — more precisely, as I was walking on the Lich Way (a rough and often faint track on peaty terrain) in the section passing below Conies Down. Please see 'Ghosts' further below for the explanation I eventually came up with.

  Amusingly I was wanting there to be in my symphony's second movement a brief women's episode like that in my own mental Sirènes improvisations out there on and around Rannoch Moor, where there's a sort of teasing slight menace in their vocal lines and harmonies, suggestive of a bit of erotic provocativeness, mirroring that in the Debussy original. I was fascinated in the way that what came out when I tried that in the composition sounded quite different and much more intense — more like a transient glimpse of an intense longing for something 'beyond' —, really without eroticism or anything like Debussy's music obviously in sight.

• La Mer — Three Symphonic Sketches, for orchestra

  Note that the version linked to includes a dramatic repeated trumpet motif quite late in the final movement, which for some not very good reason was removed in the 1909 edition of the score, and therefore isn't all that often heard in performances of the work. Allegedly the reason for cutting those really effective phrases (sometimes described as 'fanfares') was a trivial one, so there's no worthwhile justification for not restoring them.

• Préludes for piano

• Suite Pour le Piano

  As far as I can remember, this was the first of Debussy's works that came to my notice, when I was probably about nine or ten, through my father playing it on the piano. It was particularly the first movement that really grabbed me — I delighting in its dark, stormy character, and its very up-front use of the whole-tone scale in some passages.

• Children’s Corner

• Sept Méditations sur le Saint-Esprit, for organ

  You'd think that a work of music called Seven Meditations on the (supposed) 'Holy Spirit' would sound pious and churchy (or of course like Bach!), and that was my sole impression of organ music altogether up till a point in my early teens (early to mid 1950s), when I heard this astonishing tormented organ music on the family radio — most likely the first-ever UK broadcast of it. I didn't know what to make of it, but it reflected a lot of deep inner torment that seemed to be my own.

  Owing to a weird embarrassment that I had at that time about being seen to have any significant musical taste or interest, I pretended not to notice that this music was something special and having a strong effect on me, and thus I didn't learn what it was, and from then on was dying to find out what it was, but couldn't remember enough detail in the music to enable me to do any sort of search for it. Indeed, it wasn't till 2015 that I eventually got put onto Demessieux and had a real goose-pimples experience as I came upon and properly listened to this tormented music for the first time.

  What that early hearing of this music had achieved for me was to initiate an inner wish and motivation (largely subconscious) towards having something to do with organs in the future — whether playing or composing music for them. Indeed, it must have been soon after that early Demessieux experience that I actually remarked to my father that it would be nice if he played an organ (I meant a real pipe organ) instead of the piano he played daily for his own, er, whatever it was he played it for!

  He patiently explained how it wouldn't be physically possible to have a real organ in the house, for it was a normal suburban semi-detached house and there just wasn't room to fit in the requisite ranks of pipes, even using every part of the house!

  I did recognise this music as pointing to somewhere psychologically unhealthy where I most certainly didn't want to be, but (a) it had shown me something of the power of the organ for various musical idioms, and (b) my continuing wish to find and listen to that particular work at least a few times made full sense because it was highlighting some issue within me that I needed to hold up to the light and resolve, or at the very least, properly understand.

• L'Apprenti Sorcier (The Sorcerer's Apprentice)

  I remember my father introducing me and my brother to this on a 78rpm shellac record very early in the 1950s, having to turn the record over part-way through the work. This is a hair-raising precursor of major aspects of much of my own musical soundworld. Augmented triads, and incursions into scales other than major and minor to give all manner of mysterious and menacing dramatic effects.

• Symphony 2 (The Blackbird)

  In the third movement of my Symphony 6 (K2 — A Song of Striving and Adventure), which from my perspective presents an intense stylized battle of humanity against the elements and all adversity in the course of an extremely serious mountain ascent, there's a point here and there where the imposing loosely atonal 'mountain theme' gets extended, and briefly sounds to me as though it could have stepped out of the slow movement of Einar Englund's Symphony 2.

  However, that was just a fortuitous resemblance, for I heard that resemblance only when playing back after having created that passage through following the logic of the music (i.e., following the indications within the relevant deep-level template).

• Sonata Pian' e Forte

• Sinfoniae Sacrae (selection)

  I may not have heard any from this particular selection prior to picking on this in YouTube just now, but at least it gives more idea of Gabrieli's soundworld.

• Symphony 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs), movement 1

  … However, the first movement of this symphony is a brilliant and powerful exception to my general reservations about Gorecki's music, in that it has an arch-like structure consisting of a gigantic multi-stranded canonic rendering on the strings of a serious-sounding melody, gradually rising from growlings right down in the bass, eventually to moderately high, suddenly cut in the middle by the stunning contrast of the first of the 'Sorrowful Songs', followed by a resumption of the canon in the strings, now gradually descending, finishing as little growlings right down in the bass once again. The remaining two movements, however, speedily outstay their welcome for me because they keep repeating the same precious-sounding ideas, with no real sense of musical development or moving on.

  That first movement was undoubtedly one of the 'nudging' influences that helped predispose me to work with large-scale canonic structures myself later on in my life.

• Lyric Pieces for piano

• Peer Gynt Incidental Music (entire)

• Holberg Suite (original version, for piano)

…in that the composer seems to have had little concept of distilling the folk melodies into anything much beyond folk dance and song. So, to me, for example his 'symphonies' are a great let-down, because they contain more of this very beautiful modal folk-dancy music, but to my perception it seems not to be developed in any particularly meaningful or inspiring way, just remaining as the same or similar folk-dancy music. I listen right through one of his symphonies and am left wondering, Where was the symphony? Has there been a mix-up with some of his composition titles?. And indeed it all sounds remarkably similar, which is good reason why I'm not listing here any more works than the following two.

In contrast, although Vaughan Williams collected masses of English folk songs, he went so much further than the likes of Groven, in distilling those melodies' modal essence into his very personal and cogent idiom, which did enable him to write refreshingly varied and highly-developed works, including wonderfully powerful and colourful symphonies.

• Draumkvædet

• Brudgommen

• Symphony 5

  This actually inspired one of my poems, which I entitled Transcription of Hans Werner Henze's Fifth Symphony. It's in The Horizon Watcher, the paperback and Kindle e-book volume of my collected poetry. It wasn't the loud, raucous sounds, but the beautiful astringent woodwind harmonies that often appeared in the quieter moments, together with the whole of the middle (slow) movement.

  Also, listening carefully to the middle movement just now, I'm struck by various details and effects in those sparse, delicate and hugely evocative textures and details, which sound like precursors of various effects that came out in particular works of my own. I'd venture to say that that movement is the most deeply-felt and convincing out of all Henze's music I've heard.

 … The same happened when I sent him a copy of my second poetry volume. Later on, sometime after I'd left University and was wishing to hell that I could do something with the strangely disturbing but beautiful flute and piano duet draft that I'd called Monument and Reflections, which I felt had some sort of affinity with his music, I sent him a photocopy of that draft alongside one or two comments of mine about particular works of his. He wrote back without a hint of the Peter O'Brien scowls and vinegar-in-the-mouth, saying my draft did look to have promise, though of course it would need more work done on it before it could be used by anyone. — Always a deeply human sort of response from him, with absolutely no posturing or self-importance being communicated.

Then, in late 1995, once I was composing my public compositions, I sent him a cassette tape recording of my drafts of my Symphonies 1 and 3 — the latter being the full working out of Monument and Reflections. It was a sad reply I had from him, for I was just too late. He thanked me but apologized because he was ill with a 'rare blood disorder', and would probably have no chance to listen to the recordings — and he died the following year. I guess his constant pipe-smoking would have been a major factor in development of that condition; I can only guess that he had myeloid leukaemia or something of that ilk.

My first acquaintance with Holmboe's music was through following up an enthusiastic review of his Symphony 8 in The Gramophone magazine in about 1970, and buying the record. It took me aback because (a) I immediately got the impression that I already knew it pretty well, though almost certainly hadn't heard it before in this lifetime — and also (b) it seemed to be vividly portraying some sort of epic journey that I myself had been on in some previous lifetime.

Holmboe's masterful use in many of his mature works of motivic metamorphosis / evolution in organically evolving polyphonic structures gave me my strongest nudges, along with the mature symphonic works of Jean Sibelius, to recognise that aspect in my own musical 'idiom' template.

Indeed, where Holmboe appeared to be 'stuck' was that he was so attached to that motivic metamorphosis approach to composing, and to his particular choice of mode (scale) for his musical 'voice' and the atmosphere / colour of his works, that his later symphonies were a disappointment to me and various other Holmboe enthusiasts, for those symphonies gave the impression of having rather lost his way, resorting to self-imitation rather than exploring genuinely new ground any longer.

Ironically, once I got composing I scored over him in taking another, more basic 'nudge' from him — to let the starting material itself, and its potentialities, determine the direction, form and structuring of each new work. Note how that doesn't at all discourage the use of different compositional methods / processes according to the nature of the starting material, and indeed, if you really understand that basic proposition you'd see that it strongly implies keeping your musical idiom itself well open to variation according to the starting materials and consequent direction of each work.

THAT is why, while not deliberately turning away from motivic metamorphosis, I didn't keep myself strictly to that one approach but did keep to the notion of allowing the starting material to define the nature of the work, so that the work has so much more opportunity than otherwise for growing from deep within, and having a real 'vital' quality.

Here, by 'starting material' I mean not only melodic elements but also sometimes a notion of some particular experimental structure or configuration, which would define the work. Thus, such very different symphonies as my own 6th and 7th were clearly results of that sort of approach. Life's so much more interesting and vibrant when one has that more open and flexible approach, and can explore all sorts of new ground!

Some brassy fortissimos in my Symphony 5 (Magritte Gallery) and Symphony 7 (Ancient Cry for Freedom) sound as though they could owe something to Holmboe, but the sordid truth in every case there is that those effects were simply produced by how the music composition process worked out; I didn't hear those effects until I'd already composed them in the MIDI sequencer program and played them back. Must be something to do with those confounded inner templates again!

Also, I based one of the main characters in my first novel, The Hunting-Down of Michael Maus, partially on Vagn Holmboe the person. I called him Vagn Langgaard, and it became clear that he was a rather distant descendant of a composer by the name of Rued Langgaard (apparently the one listed further below), but he is fairly recognisable as somebody at least similar to Vagn Holmboe, whereas he couldn't in the slightest be recognised as the real Rued Langgaard, who was eccentric to the point that many would regard him as mentally disordered or indeed schizophrenic.

Holmboe comes across (in photos and accounts of him, and the aforementioned correspondence I had with him) as friendly, very stable, peaceful and deeply thoughtful (I'd have loved to have had him as a neighbour), whereas a high proportion of photos of Rued Langgaard reveal a disturbingly manic countenance, suggestive of a highly volatile individual with some big chips on his shoulder, too screwed-up to have the sort of depth of connection that Holmboe had.

There would have been also a more general nudging effect upon me towards the motivic development approach, building an organic, flowing sense of growth or a journey, not only from Holmboe's mature works but likewise from those of Sibelius — in both cases initially emerging in my (all experimental) poetry. Many of the most effective utterances used that approach — though it could be combined also with other approaches such as the apposition of contrasting blocks. What I've always regarded as a particular 'pinnacle' poem of mine, which I felt to have a very Holmboe-like drive was Waking Thoughts On the Night-Edge* — though I appreciate that it would go right over the heads of the vast majority!

• Symphony 6 (not on YouTube)

  I deliberately started composing my Symphony 8 (The Ferryman) commencing with the slow and serious melody that opens Holmboe's Sixth — but the multi-stranded canonic structure I had it build up transformed it into something glowing and radiant and not at all like the sound of Holmboe's quietly troubled version. I'm not aware of any other connection between my Symphony 8 and anything of Holmboe at all.

• Symphony 7

• Symphony 8 (Sinfonia Boreale), movement 1 only

  (this is my much-preferred version — Jerzy Semkow / Royal Danish Orchestra. I couldn't find the other three movements of this version at YouTube)

  Symphony 8 (Sinfonia Boreale) (entire)

  (poorer performance, impetuously tending to over-dramatize and to lose important details)

  I incorporated a few motifs from the first movement of that symphony into an early stage of the 'search' in movement 1 of my own Symphony 1 (Sagarmatha). I used them deliberately as 'problem' motifs, which played the role of bogeys from the past that were trying to obstruct the 'search', and which were rapidly expunged — the final, climactic, confrontation allowing the 'search' to break free into new territory with the beginnings of the sense of heroism that defines that symphony of mine overall.

• Tempo Variabile — fourth of his Symphonic Metamorphoses

  An absolutely brilliant intense four-movement 'mini symphony', with the most intricate working out of a whole plethora of motifs metamorphosing, with breathtaking changes of perspective often rushing past like strongly wind-blown clouds across the sky. As with his Symphonies 7 and 8, there's a haunting sense of an immense inner pain and a desperation to find a way out of it.

  The 'resolution' at the end is a beautiful thematic resolution, yes, but with a sense of the desperate chase among the wind-gusts and racing clouds for a real resolution being doomed to continue indefinitely. I recognise it as reflecting a particular type of second-level hell experience — though presumably Holmboe had no idea of that.

  This work was inspiration for one of my early poems — The Wind, which you can find in The Horizon Watcher, the paperback and Kindle e-book volume of my collected poetry.

  The above YouTube link is actually to an album of the four Symphonic Metamorphoses, so you can listen to the others too there.

… It wasn't at all my first experience of bitonality, though. The first and most striking example that stood out for me, though I didn't have the concept of bitonality then, was in the electrifying trumpet fanfare against a quiet background ostinato, portraying the final curse from the ghost of Petrouchka (see under Stravinsky much further below).

• Egdon Heath

  In my teens I used to have family holidays in the Purbeck area of Dorset, which actually includes Egdon Heath, so Holst's Egdon Heath had a particular resonance for me, and I can vouch for its quite eerily faithful portrayal of just the sorts of impression I myself got from that area as a teenager.

  The only thing that spoiled the effect a bit was that in real life there was too little distance between the quite busy roads that cut through those Dorset heathland areas. Also, forestry operations (planting stands of conifer trees) were progressively gobbling up more and more of the heathland — though I expect a stop would have been put to that at some point to conserve not just the heathland habitat in its own right, but some rare fauna that goes with it there.

  It's likely that this terse and uncompromising nature poem, along with the even more uncompromising Tapiola by Sibelius, both of which affected me deeply, helped predispose me towards producing my own unique terse and uncompromising musical nature poem, which is Music From the Mountain Waters. It doesn't sound remotely like either Holst or Sibelius — though it's closer to Tapiola in its elemental severity and its adherence to just two melodic elements, both of which are on one (weird) scale, giving it a certain hectoring quality.

• The Planets

  Each of this suite's movements had something special for me. There's actually a section in my choral Symphony 7 (Ancient Cry for Freedom) which very briefly sounds as though it could have stepped out of The Planets' final movement (Neptune the Mystic). The sordid truth is that it came out like that primarily through the way I was putting the canonic voices together, so the effect was largely fortuitous, except that as I immediately noticed a certain resemblance I added a couple of details to take advantage of that resemblance and make a little extra 'something' of it — but in reality, if you listen particularly carefully to both works you'd realize that the resemblance is more of a brief convergence as a result of somewhat overlapping templates, and my Symphony 7 still stands unique out of all music I've got to know.

  On the other hand I did quite deliberately 'borrow' from the Saturn, Bringer of Old Age movement in one work. I used the increasingly menacing chord sequences that its chorale-like melody leads into, which rise to the climax that breaks into the 'panic' section. I used it (on the piano) in The Seen and the Unseen, for two saxophones (soprano+alto) and piano, in the third movement (Processional: At the Foot of the Volcano) — though I doubt that many listeners would make a connection between the two works there, for in that context it sounds to be altogether a different piece of music, as indeed it is!

• St Paul's Suite, for string orchestra

  I got to know this piece during my teens as a piano version, which my father often played for a while. Subsequently I found the 'official' string orchestra version rather disappointing, preferring the greater incisiveness and more bell-like quality of the piano sound.

• Terzetto

  A chamber work in which all three instruments are in different keys, yet the overall effect is beautiful in its own rather reserved way. This and some works of Charles Ives (see below) undoubtedly helped predispose me to experiment with different scales being put together in an ensemble, in a manner that I'd never thought of during my ten years of formal music composition…

  In 2012 I started a new sound recording project entitled Wind Chimes in the Wild, in which I hung up sets of high-grade precision-tuned wind chimes, both single set and ensembles, each tuned to a carefully selected different scale, in wild places — generally on tree branches high up in the Teign Gorge, in the north-eastern fringe of the Dartmoor National Park, but also the smaller chimes sometimes on clifftops in Cornwall, with sea sound background.

  Much of the point of that was to make recordings of various combinations of two or more sets of chimes, so pitting the different scales against each other. Sometimes I recorded as many as six sets of chimes together (indeed, seven if you don't count the large plus small sets of bamboo chimes as being one, as I did)!

  The results have nearly all been in different ways hair-raisingly beautiful, especially with the natural soundscapes that were an intrinsic aspect of each recording. With the Davis Blanchard chimes in particular, masses of microtonal intervals resulted from the chimes' just intonation when their different scales were heard together — giving outlandishly other-worldly musical experiences.

  Bitonality / polytonality occurs in various of my works, though generally without me actually thinking 'bi/polytonality'. Rather, it just happened to exist within the particular deep-level templates I was connecting with. A particularly striking bitonality is heard in De Profundis Clamavi, between the three trumpets and the bell sounds, giving an effect that is both other-worldly and almost unbearably intense though still greatly beautiful (at least, to my ears!).

It then became clear to me that Hovhaness was rather a disappointment for me, for his idiom — very spirituality-loaded — had about it an extreme beauty and often sense of mystery, yet stayed almost all the time within a sweetness 'comfort zone' and lacked the variety to support the large number of works that he composed.

The same distinctive harmonic progressions, modal cadences and overall sonorities, coupled often with motifs common to other works of his, combined to give his works generally a sense of self-imitation, which could have been lessened to a fair degree by not composing so many works — being more discriminating about what he commits to score, or at least allows to be published.

From my current perspective I'd say that Hovhaness's awareness was pretty weakly grounded, and his music was thus also weakly grounded in its vision and 'message' — which in practical terms results in a weak sense of structure and musical development. Even in his beautiful Symphony 2, various of its ideas become tedious because of their repetitions with minimal variation and very little sense of actually going anywhere.

No doubt at all, other people with weakly grounded awareness would love his music for that very reason, while their real need (as distinct from 'want') would in every case be for them to get grounding their awareness properly, for the sake of both their mental and physical health, and to keep their choice of music listening focused on much more structured and intellectually engaging works.

• Symphony 2 (Mysterious Mountain)

  This, despite its 1958 vintage, is the original recording I got to know, which stands head and shoulders above all other performances of this I've heard, particularly with regard to handling of the fast double fugue.

  It's quite possible that this symphony helped predispose me towards making a mountain or mountains subjects in works of my own — though clearly my own mountain-walking experiences would have been a more obvious factor. I'm as sure as can be, though, that on a musical level his music has had no obvious effect on mine.

  — Except, now I think of it a year or two later, there is an important element in my symphonic poem Golgotha to Rozabal that does have a rather similar exotic sort of sound, and Hovhaness could have helped predispose me to include that element — though my slight 'sound-alike' is more grounded — with a sense of forward motion through being part of a compelling musical narrative.

• Symphony 4

  An amazing work, sounding superficially to be an undisciplined mess — yet every time I hear even its most anarchic sections I find it haunting. I got a strong impression that this symphony was nudging me towards potentiality of my own to experiment with somewhat similar throwing together of wildly disparate musical ideas in ways that are actually musically cogent (i.e., meaningful to at least some listeners).

  In addition to any bitonality urges prompted by some of Holst's music, as noted further above, this, together with some other Ives works, was probably one of the 'nudging' influences that predisposed me eventually to go recording ensembles of precision-tuned wind chimes out in the wilds, each set tuned to a different scale. I got the most amazingly beautiful (and often challenging) musical effects that way.

• The Unanswered Question

  A 'nudge' from this work may well have predisposed me eventually to compose The Unknown, for organ and tuba, part of whose underlying idea was remarkably similar, though not at all the music, which is strongly my own idiom, with no obvious resemblances to any other composer's work to the best of my knowledge. The Unknown differs in its conception, however, in using the 'unanswered question' idea merely as its starting point as it searches for and actually discovers an apparent resolution to the whole conundrum. It's thus a much more varied and mentally stimulating (read 'healthily challenging') work, quite apart from being more adventurous yet again with regard to its sound world.

… Although sometimes the whole-tone scale was used to communicate a sense of menace (such as in Taras Bulba), it was often used in a really interesting and highly individual way — mixed into his warm sweet idiom, it had the effect of an intensifier of the emotional effect of that sweetness.

Janáček is likely the composer above all to bring tears to my eyes. For me, one of his most tear-inducing utterances is 'no more than' a beautiful nature-centric fairy story (The Cunning Little Vixen) — and, despite its playful humorous lightness of touch, its sweetness is thickly laced with the whole-tone scale, giving it all an immense beauty that ordinary 'romantic' sweetness could never convey. I find myself deeply affected by hearing the forester singing in that almost tinkling whole-tone-laced idiom — and of course by the opera's ending.

• The Cunning Little Vixen (orchestral suite from the opera)

  The Cunning Little Vixen (full opera, staged)

  Libretto for the above (Important — Unless you already know this opera well, you will need this despite the production being in English, and there being rather funny translation errors in the libretto.)

  Although I put a rather mauled reference to a motif from this work into an episode in movement 2 of my Symphony 1, it hardly sounds like Janáček, and more like just a variant of 'me'! That could reasonably be expected if the symphony is indeed drawn from a template within deeper consciousness.

  However, the really touching ending of this opera did inspire the very end of my third novel, The Awful Destiny of Physalia Gorgon — but of course I'm not letting on about how that connection worked out in practice, apart from vouchsafing that my mischievous sense of humour got in on the act!

• From the House of the Dead (Sung in Czech, and I couldn't find an English libretto to point you to)

  An immensely compelling depiction of humanity within a Siberian prison camp. This isn't the chamber of horrors that many other composers might have made of that subject, but a deeply empathetic interplay between the oppression of the Authorities and individual destructive behaviours on the one hand and the flashes of the underlying real humanity on the other. Janáček's warm and passionate music everywhere emphasizes that genuine human side of the situation and the individuals. Could any other composer (at least, that I know of) have brought such 'heart' and beauty into a Siberian prison camp, without simply glossing things over? — Pretty unlikely, I'd have thought!

• Sinfonietta

• Taras Bulba

• Glagolitic Mass

  This beautiful and inspiring work had been performed over the years, and still is largely, in the revision that came shortly after its first performance, owing to performance difficulties that had been experienced with some intricacies in the original version. That simplification, however, had lost some effectiveness of the work, and so relatively recently this new version had been created, restoring much of what had previously been smoothed over. In this performance the Intrada, which is generally performed only at the end of the work, is played at both beginning and end.

• String Quartet 1 (Kreutzer Sonata)

• Piano Sonata 1.X.1905

  A somewhat 'historical' quality of sound for this piano sonata, but this performance — my introduction to this work in the late 1960s — gets the best balance I've heard, between (a) maintaining 'flow' and (b) disrupting it with the eruptive fast staccato phrases in the first movement. Most pianists appear to me to over-smooth that music and gloss over Janáček's likely intention considering how he uses such sudden staccato phrases in other works of his.

  I guess the primary issue is that most professional pianists want to sound 'professional', and succeed in giving most people that impression by mauling each work they play, to impose an image of their own self-importance upon the music through making it sound 'refined', with sharp edges smoothed down, and with unjustified degrees of rubato. But that's rarely any good with Janáček, in whose music sharp contrasts are very much part of his style, reflecting his fiery personality.

• The Mystery of Time — passacaglia for large orchestra

  A thrillingly impressive and still little-known work, which is a beautiful example of how fully logical structuring and development of a music work can be powerfully emotive. To me the title doesn't convey anything particularly useful about the music, but the music itself definitely seems to 'mean' something pretty compelling and urgent, whatever the title.

  Such intensity, with logical structuring, is quite characteristic of Kabeláč, though often his works can seem rather abrasive, with a disjointed and abrupt intensity, whereas here the music flows more smoothly. The rather harsh sound here of course is from the rather elderly (1960s) recording, and nothing to do with the music itself.

  This work actually gave me a very strong nudge, no doubt because aspects of that work's structure and development resembled elements of certain compositional tendencies that were already innate in me. In the event, however, I never got round to directly exploring that particular ground during my ten years of active composing.

  However, it could well be that more indirect nudging had still worked through from this work. I'm thinking of:
  (a) my Symphony 5 (Magritte Gallery), which itself is based on a chaconne (it appears that there's no general agreement as to any formal distinction between chaconne and passacaglia), albeit that chaconne being creatively broken up to produce a weirdly asymmetrical arch structure, and
  (b) my Symphony 7 (Ancient Cry for Freedom), which (twice) builds up from a sparse and quiet beginning to a powerful climax, though here both climaxes are more like volcanic eruptions, and the overall structure, unlike any other work I know, has been likened to a slowly revolving multiple prayer wheel. So, no other composer but this bumbling monkey can be credited or blamed for that aspect of the symphony!

… There were two short orchestral pieces that captivated me when I heard them on the radio in my teens, but whose composer I didn't know at the time, and which eventually proved to be by Khachaturian. One was a waltz. Now, generally waltzes are quite to very 'yuck' for me, but this particular waltz had a wild and rather gloomy quality that always reminded me of dull windy day in July — but it had such an energy about it that it made something beautiful and meaningful of the wildness rather than just gloss over deeper life experience as waltzes normally tend to do. You can even get to enjoy a dull windy summer day when it's associated with gutsy music like this!

The other was a tremendously energetic and rhythmically compelling dance-like piece, which quite thrilled me, even back then when I was generally looking for music that resonated with all sorts of less happy emotions. I've never felt so carried away by a dance movement as with this. After this, the much more widely-known Sabre Dance from the same ballet, while still having a tremendous energy and drive about it, is an anticlimax through its being more in the nature of a simplistic rabble-raiser — albeit an excellent one.

During my 2020 YouTube researches for this list I explored bits of Khachaturian's work, and was very impressed. What really struck me was that he seemed to be writing more consistently from his deeper levels, and with much less or maybe no sense of personal and political issues fouling up the creative process as was happening with Prokofiev and especially Shostakovich.

If I had the time I'd spend a lot of time listening right through his ballets, other orchestral works and piano works. What a pity I didn't get more in touch with his works when I was originally exploring 20th Century classical music, and didn't have so many higher priorities more recently for spending my precious time resources! Of course back then there was no YouTube, so it would have been much more difficult to do without more financial outlay on (vinyl) records and eventually CDs.

Having said all that, though, I'm not aware of any obvious connections between his music and any of my music or literary works.

• Toccata for piano

• Lezghinka, from the ballet Gayaneh

• Waltz from Masquerade ballet suite

• Dances of Galánta (piano arrangement)

  I got to know this quite well from the piano arrangement, which my father played a lot for a time during my teens. I'm not keen on the performance linked to here, for as usual the playing is too affected and draws too much attention to the pianist rather than the music as intended by the composer — but this was the best I could find. There's another set of dances from this composer — the Dances of Marosszék —, but I found them disappointingly unmemorable compared with the Galánta set.

• Hary Janoš (orchestral suite)

  In one section of my Symphony 5 (Magritte Gallery) I use a mauled and then more direct quote of the 'Song' melody of the third movement of this suite.

• Psalmus Hungaricus
  

  A beautiful and stirring choral work — though as with all works based on religious texts, one needs to firmly set aside all the religious connotations in order to benefit most, and to be harmed least through cultivation of unhelpful beliefs / illusory realities.

… He espoused a very crude sort of Christian mysticism, which extended religious imagery rather than setting aside the theological stuff and focusing on inner experience as a true mystic would (not that I commend even that, as I explain in my Self-Actualization and Clear-Mindedness website!).

The majority of his works are in a sort-of late Romantic idiom, with suggestions sometimes of Mendelssohn or Schumann, usually after having drunk rather more than they were supposed to — but in quite a number also having suggestions of Wagner and Richard Strauss — but often with an unsettling sense of something more elemental and even violent trying to break out — no doubt reflecting whatever was behind his manic facial expression and many of his weird behaviours.

Generally speaking, I was much more interested in a different, more experimental side of his oeuvre, which sounded much more 20th-Century and sharp-edged, as exemplified by the works listed here. He regarded that side of his oeuvre as being 'demonic', claiming preference for his (relatively) more conventional late Romantic style, regarding that as more God / divinity compatible.

In the light of my own life experiences and insights gained therefrom, I do think Langgaard was showing a surprising insightfulness in regarding that more experimental side of his work as being 'demonic' in nature (i.e., tending to connect one to the 'dark side') — though that insightfulness was still within the constraints of the harmful illusory realities of his religious belief system.

And it's at least highly questionable as to whether his late Romantic style was doing anything more than trying to avoid facing emotional issues that he was afraid to face up to and get resolving; in reality he was preferring it because he felt more comfortable with it, rather than it being objectively superior in any way. In music at least, romanticism generally is the language / style of the not-so aware composers, whose focus is primarily in the level of superficial, transient emotion rather than deeper awareness and more elemental expression.

In his more 'demonic' works (as he was rationalizing it) he was actually connecting more deeply (no doubt at all, using deep-level templates), and it's a great loss for us that he was apparently so afraid of what he was bringing out when working in that mode, that he kept reverting to his less-aware, more superficially sourced composing mode.

• Music of the Spheres (Be aware that the opening is extremely quiet, and is meant to be so, for this work has a huge dynamic range!!)

  A unique work for large orchestra, consisting of a large number of short sections, which both individually and in total effect evoke a huge space full of enigmas and haunting images. Langgaard gives a mundane nutshell description of each, but to me that just trivializes the vastness of the vision he'd created. Best to listen without reading his headline descriptions, and allow the enigmas to be unknowns within this huge space of the unknowable. If I'd composed that or a similar work, indeed I rather think 'Music of the Unknowable' would be an excellent title for it!

• Symphony 6 (Det Himmelrivende)

  The Danish title appears to be ambiguous. In Google Translate, 'Himmelrivende' comes out at 'Heavenly', but 'Himmel rivende' becomes 'Sky roaring'. I've seen various English translations of this work's title, including The Rending Heavens (which seems to me to be the most natural and appropriate translation) and The Heaven-storming'.

  Because of its unusual form for a work regarded as a symphony, this took me a few listens before I connected with it — but once I'd done so, I found every listen to it to be compellingly exciting, and in places even quite goose-pimply!

  The symphony's structure is extremely unusual for anything called a symphony, for it's notionally a set of variations on the opening theme. Actually, as I hear it, many of the variations are not so much using the whole melody but creating all manner of dramatics from a three-note motif taken from it, including inverted and reversed forms.

  However, if you put much attention on identifying individual variations you'd lose the plot and quite a bit of the music's effectiveness, because there's a progressive build-up of energy and tension right to the awesome climax in the middle, after which the various episodes or variations have the feel of being a series of postludes, leading one on finally to the exultant blaze of glory that concludes the work.

  The descending three opening notes of the 'heroic' theme in my Symphony 1 (Sagarmatha) could be seen by some individuals as being taken from the aforementioned three-note motif that is used so creatively in Langgaard's 6th. However, that isn't so at all, for all that came up in the original duet sketch that later got developed into the symphony — and I wrote that sketch in 1978, whereas my first encounter with Langgaard's music wasn't till nine or ten years later. Indeed, that motif is extremely potent — I'd say 'pregnant' —, and I'm sure I could use it as at least a major element in more than one myself, without any sense of plagiarism.

• Music of the Abyss (aka Music of the Depths), for piano solo

  There's more than a hint of Carl Nielsen's piano Suite Op. 45 in Langgaard's piano style here, but while Nielsen's Suite has about it a steely objectivity and often great delicacy, here we have an amazing depiction of what one can at least suspect is Langgaard's inner torments and pent-up frustrations seeking expression — all the things underlying his manic countenance and strange and at times volatile behaviours.

  Despite its problematical aspect, this wayward piano work really is an impressive and consciousness-widening experience. Also, for me myself it has been really educational with regard to ways one can play the piano to achieve particular effects for the listener. It could well be that this piece, as well as Nielsen's Suite, helped predispose me towards the rather 'brittle' and at times explosive piano style in my saxophone / piano trios — especially in Nordic Wilderness Journey — though once again we'd be talking about a nudge towards tuning into a template of my own, rather than direct imitation.

• Antikrist (church opera)

  As an amused aside, I have something slightly in common with this work — its title, i.e., in its English form!!! — Of course I mean, in certain individuals' limited and somewhat twisted view of me and of the nature of reality! Yes, I myself have indeed (seriously) been called an Antichrist! — Belief is truly a wondrous thing!

  I include this very odd work here not as one that I really got on with before or while I was composing, but as a particularly striking example of an interplay of Langgaard's supposedly 'demonic' music from his 6th Symphony and Music of the Spheres on the one hand and his extended late Romantic idiom on the other. It presents a scenario putting forward some of Langgaard's crude sort-of mystical Christianity, in which reality appears to be dominated by an ongoing conflict between a symbolic 'good' and 'evil'.

  While I see the religious content as nonsensical and downright harmful as any sort of statement of 'faith' or 'Truth', nowadays I find this work on a purely musical level to be remarkably beautiful and fascinating in its weird contrasts of style, and I find it quite surreal, hearing passages containing variants of passages in his Symphony 6 and Music of the Spheres rubbing shoulders with the rather posed 'morality' implicit there in the more conventional 'late Romantic' style.

  I wouldn't have included Antikrist in this list, however, as it doesn't relate to any of my music as far as I'm aware, BUT it's here because I picked up a tiny literary morsel from it, which I used as an enigmatic motif that pops up here and there in my first novel, The Hunting-Down of Michael Maus. It's simply the motto phrase that keeps popping up in this opera (always signalled with a transient figure on the celesta), i larmens kirke-øde (in the din of the emptiness [|desolation|desert] of the church [|Church]). A great expression in our confused and functionally sub-human civilization, worthy of much wider use, no matter in what language!

• Missa 'Salve Regina'

  This appears to have been composed as a spectacular ceremonial piece. A good performance of this in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris can indeed sound outlandishly spectacular, as evidenced by the recording linked to here. If you want to buy a CD of that work, you need that specific recording, because all others that I'm aware of, apart from the historical (mono) first recording of it (also In Notre Dame), sound like damp squibs in comparison — they hardly sound to be the same work at all!

• Messe Solennelle (Sorry about the distracting abstract painting visuals in that video!)

  I've listened to a range of his organ works, and very much enjoyed most of them — though generally feeling less connection with them than with the aforementioned three other French composers.

  To save time trawling around for a selection of examples (short works), I'm cheating here by giving a single longer work that gives an excellent picture of a good range of his sound and range of expression, both on the organ and with choir, and which I really like, but which I'd probably not heard before my writing these notes here.

  Thus this work is extremely unlikely to have given me any input for my own composition work, and is given here just as an example of the sorts of sound that I was hearing in the many Langlais pieces I've heard at various times.

• Dante Sonata

  The hushed moments of uneasy peacefulness in this powerfully dramatic work may possibly have predisposed me towards the hushed epilogue in the first movement of The Seen and the Unseen, though my general experience of composing that movement was that the epilogue came out simply as part of the musical 'argument'. It did, however, immediately remind me of the Dante Sonata passages.

• Via Crucis

  An intriguing choral work, with a great and seemingly 'transcendent' beauty despite its exceptionally austere and almost painfully sombre / melancholy-sounding choral representation of the story of the crucifixion of 'Jesus'. It was definitely the inspiration for the opening and structural starting point of my fifth novel, Three Blind Executioners.

  Not only does the novel start with the crucifixion of Fred, our supposed new 'Saviour', but also it proves to be a 'Via Crucis' ('Way of the Cross') for Dave, the central character, on his way to (almost) the summit of Everest. The novel's subtitle is in fact Betrayal and Crucifixion of Climber on Mount Everest Just 174 Metres Short of the Summit, Without Oxygen, and indeed Via Crucis is the penultimate chapter's title. — Make of that what you will, but do read the novel in any case for a real eye-opening awareness-expanding experience (Plug, plug)!

  One aspect of that novel that doesn't exactly match the bleak, oppressive melancholy of the Liszt work is the weird dream-like surrealism, well laced with my mischievous sense of humour. Poor old Franz could have taken a few leaves out of my book to his own considerable benefit!

• Messe de Notre Dame

  I incorporated a little of that influence (the bare fourths and fifths) in my humorous Flapping Duck Song and the 'Flapping Duck' Fantasy that I based on it (Use the Song link for the Fantasy too) — while clearly still keeping well in contemporary times and aiming to write something much more varied and stimulating than 'medieval music' could ever be.

Martinů's music is very much based in Moravian folk music / dance, so here's a really interesting contrast with Eivind Groven, who seemed unable really significantly to distil his folk-dance music source into varied and dramatic works such as symphonies (as already noted, Groven's 'symphonies' seem to lack significant development or contrasts that take him beyond the folk-music idiom). Martinů, on the other hand, was clearly able to make that important break, at least on a good day, and create compelling musical structures and dramas, as Vaughan Williams had also been able to.

• Double Concerto for Two String Orchestras, Piano and Timpani

  A real iconic work! — Written in 1938 while the international news was darkening by the day and World War 2 was drawing anguishingly close, this extraordinary — indeed unique — musical utterance isn't only compelling listening, but is also greatly educational. Here, the normally rather undisciplined Martinů compositional style had taken a new and seriously impressive turn, for the only way he could handle the stress and strong emotions of the time in a new work was through a strictly neoclassical approach, which held his feelings at arm's length.

  That way, working more objectively to produce a beautifully shaped and proportioned concertante work, paradoxically he was able to bring not just his personal feelings, but the fears and aspirations and determination against all odds of all his fellow countrypeople into a proper, and indeed intense focus for the listener. This is a real lesson for those who imagine that the purpose of music is simply to 'express yourself', and that intellectually satisfying form and structure would just get in the way!

  The reality is that aiming for personal expression obstructs any possibility of the much deeper and more rewarding 'universal' expression, which is what we all need to be opening up in the course of cultivating our creativity.

  This recording is the original one that I got to know, with Karel Sejna conducting, and I've never since heard such an effective and compelling performance. Other conductors whose performances of this work I'd got to know, evidently having labelled the work as 'neoclassical', tended to keep to the letter of the popular notion of 'neoclassical' and minimize the sense of drama and real live experience embodied in this work, while Sejna captures the whole experience powerfully, with a real drive and 'flow'.

• Symphony 3

• Symphony 4

• Symphony 6 (Fantaisies Symphoniques) (Charles Munch, Boston PO)

  This long-ago performance is still by far the most effective I've heard, giving the work a greater sense of drive and spontaneity than I've heard from anyone else.

• Frescoes of Pierra Della Francesca

• The Epic of Gilgamesh

  A sensationally vivid and compelling choral portrayal of part of the Gilgamesh legend, drawn from a selection of the Sumerian clay tablets, as transcribed into a rather munged English by R. Campbell Thompson, but here in Czech. I did link here to a description and English text (actually belonging to a different recording) to aid comprehension / navigation, but that has become unavailable, and I couldn't find an alternative download source for that.

  I used a tiny orchestral quote from one of the most desolate and anxious moments in the whole work, in my Symphony 5 (Magritte Gallery), as one of the quotes from various composers that I'd used humorously in that symphony. At face value that appears to have been a bizarre move of mine, but then any such bizarreness was simply part of my light-hearted approach in composing the symphony. In any case, in the different context the quoted little motif sounds just deliciously mysterious, but at arm's length, as though it's part of a picture you're looking at, rather than a drama that you're involved in — so it works brilliantly in fulfilling my intentions there.

  I also ported an adaptation of the actual moment in the drama associated with the aforementioned musical quote* into a similarly desolate and anxious moment near the end of my 4th novel, Still Life With Strangled Porcupines (yes, you did read that right!). In the music, that moment brings in a brief repeat of the opening bars of the work, while in my novel, at the equivalent point we have an apparent repeat of the decidedly 'earthy' opening of the novel.

  * [Gilgamesh]
  …
  Enkidu I have so loved, like to the dust has become!
  Shall I not also lay me down like him,
  through all eternity never returning?

The second movement then built up from that, with various hauntingly visionary and often intense passages — the whole seeming to have a rather brittle quality, detached from everyday human emotion, but certainly affecting me very strongly as a visionary piece. — And that work was the Mandala Symphony.

Much more recently I explored some other works of his, and found them all in their different ways powerful and very much worth listening to — though my acquaintance with those all came a long time after my ten years of composing, so couldn't have had any effect on my own works.

• Mandala Symphony

… My use of the octatonic scale is most obvious in an arched melody in my symphonic poem Golgotha to Rozabal, where, late in the work, the melody re-emerges as a rarefied choral fugue. I don't think I've heard an octatonic fugue anywhere else, and it's the only 'proper' fugue I ever composed! I should point out, though, that I did NOT consciously choose to use this or that particular named scale; I was working by aural intuition, which was undoubtedly feeding through from the relevant deep-level template.

Messiaen's organ music was a particular goad for me towards my composing for the organ, and I learnt a lot from his works about the sorts of registration I wanted to use in any organ works of my own — though Jehan Alain's organ works were another educational / motivating factor for me.

In the event, when Carson Cooman eventually urged me to write an organ work for him (he suggested organ plus another, solo, instrument), and I took up the challenge with a little guidance from him over some practical points, again it appeared to be a deep-level template of mine that directed the composition process, including supplying the particular scales used, so, apart from some Messiaen-like registrations, the music that emerged had a secure individuality all of its own. That work was The Unknown, for organ and tuba, of all stupid things (albeit a euphonium or tenor tuba)! Yes, I do crazy things like that, because I'm Philip Goddard the funny (read 'arrogant') little crazy monkey, and not a pseudo-Messiaen nor pseudo-Rachmaninov (etc.) wannabe!

Caution needed — apparent Satanistic connections!
I, along with a fair number of other people, sense an underlying 'dark' resonance in much of Mesiaen's music — that is, the occult, metaphysical meaning of 'dark'. When I talk of 'Satanism', I mean it, perhaps ignorantly, in a broad sense, including any seriously 'dark' occultism.

Whatever the reality of Messiaen's private as well as public life, I myself sense strong suggestions of Satanism in various of his works — the combinations of thick sugary-sweet harmonies combined with menacing harmonies arising from his modes of limited transposition; the over-the-top expressions of exuberance and ecstasy; fixations on what he appears to believe to be the ultimate expression of 'love', i.e., fusion of two individuals in a sort of Tristan and Isolde 'Liebestod' (love-death) ecstatic oblivion (extremely unhealthy even to contemplate or desire!).

In that context, even his overpowering and stultifying attachment to Roman Catholic theological imagery and interpretation in writing or speaking about his music is consistent with Satanistic resonances (although of course not proving anything) — not so surprising once one understands that religion itself is a product of garbage interference in our lives, the 'divine' and the 'demonic' both being nothing more than illusory manifestations created within one's mindspace by the garbage, and so being just different-looking faces of the same highly untoward phenomenon.

However, I have no specific indications that Messiaen was aware of that aspect of his work. I'm aware that some people believe (or at least did believe, back in the late 1960s, when I heard about that) that he was a covertly practising Satanist, but there are always people who will believe something a bit sensational like that, in an attempt to make their dull lives a bit more interesting, so I hold that story very much at arm's length! In fact I'd have thought that if Messiaen had been a practising Satanist of any sort, such a high-profile person as him would surely not have been able to keep it secret from the wider public for at all long.

In any case, at least for my purposes it doesn't matter what the truth is about that. I know from my own music compositions and paying attention to what's clearly been going on for other composers, that music and ideas that have Satanistic resonances for us quite readily emerge spontaneously, and are usually not recognised for what they are. Parts of certain works of my own appear to have some degree of Satanism resonance, but at least I do my best to point to healthy and constructive ways of experiencing that music, minimizing any problematical effects.

You can also find plenty of Satanistic resonances in the music of, say, Rachmaninov, Liszt, and especially Scriabin, and those all need to be treated with an aware and sensible circumspection. So I really do mean that this is a pretty common phenomenon in classical music. — And of course within the arena of various genres of popular music really brazen Satanism, whether or not actually called that, blares out from the ear-shattering distorted sonic outpourings from the various bands, all getting far bigger followings than any listening that is actually healthy and cultivates our mental heath rather than limit or destroy it!

Organ works — especially:

• Messe de la Pentecôte

• Livre d’Orgue

  Both the above works have been long-standing favourites of mine in the organ repertoire, and every organ work Messiaen produced subsequently to those lacked the impact for me that these two had. With these two I get the maximum sense of exploring new musical terrain, in some of the movements experimenting with a fascinating sort-of serialization of rhythmic components.

  While to most people both of these are seen as too far-out and 'difficult' a listen — especially Livre d'Orgue —, to me these have always stood out as glorious particularly effective 'absolute' music, transcending any religious subtext that Messiaen would put on them.

  Indeed, in Livre d'Orgue, only two movements have a religious reference in their titles. Its third movement in particular evokes for me a thrilling sense of being on or among the highest peaks in the Alps, with breathtaking drops all around these exalted climbing goals, while its first two movements I find compellingly intriguing because they give a sense of being beyond understanding, but yet I can sense that in each there is some sort of process occurring so that the notes and their gorgeously weird sonorities all have some sort of meaningful relationship with each other. Indeed, the same can be said too of the fifth and seventh movements.

  As for Messe de la Pentecôte, a hilariously dark and scary passage (repeated with modifications a little later) in the second movement (if I understood correctly from Messiaen's own notes about the work, it was intended to represent the 'Beast of the Apocalypse'!) gets its truly monstrous power NOT through use of standard cheap discord gestures such as arms laid or crashed onto the keys of a manual, but through a process of serialization of rhythmic units, which is occurring in all three playing registers (hands and the feet) independently — it must be extremely difficult to execute correctly.

  It's that sense of a purposeful process taking the music forward that gives the music such power — well, also including one of Messiaen's beloved modes of limited transposition — I think nothing more than the octatonic scale, which gives that whole passage a menacing and spooky quality. I've little doubt that things like that helped predispose me towards the 'hell' motif in my symphonic poem Tears of Avalokiteshvara, even though it would have arisen anyway out of the relevant deep-level template that I came to use for that work.

• Apparition de l'Eglise Eternelle

  If you look at the comments on some YouTube videos of this work, you'd see that in general they all accept and sometimes elaborate on Messiaen's actually nonsensical and mentally stultifying theologically-based description of what this work is supposed to be depicting. The sordid truth is that it's simply an amazing, incredible piece of music, best heard in a very reverberant cathedral, as in the case of this video (in Notre Dame, Paris), but, like ALL music, it's NOT objectively anything that its composer or indeed anyone else says it is, apart from its simply being 'a [powerful] piece of music'!

  Messiaen simply attached a very silly and unhelpful story to it, because his beliefs prevented him from knowing any better! That music doesn't need an explanation or 'story' at all, because anyone, at least free from belief, can experience that music as reflecting various powerful and awe-inspiring manifestations of 'Mother Nature', or, even more effectively, they can let go altogether of the urge to limit its effect by attaching a specific picture or story to it. It's at its most effective for those who can let go of all imagery and just rest in the experience of the music. Simple as that!

  To me, when I do rather tenuously allow an image to be associated with it, it's a very creditable reflection of a towering rugged mountain gradually appearing as the obscuring cloud temporarily clears, or it could be the grandeur of the development and eventual dissolution of a supercell thundercloud — and many other possibilities. Tying this work just to one image of something that's purely illusory (and part of an immensely harmful world of self-deception) greatly limits — not endows it with — its effectiveness and genuine 'meaning'.

  A fair number of people actually find it quite frightening, no doubt usually because they're picking up the apparent Satanistic connection — but the healthiest approach is to acknowledge that particular 'resonance' and flag it mentally as 'irrelevant' and then to pay attention to other, much healthier, things it also reflects, such as what I've already suggested.

  In various ways, this work figures in three of my novels: Still Life With Strangled Porcupines, Three Blind Executioners, and Forbidden Flood Warning.

• La Nativité du Seigneur
  

  A greatly impressive big nine-movement work — the first of Messiaen's large organ cycles. Again, all the (harmful) religious subtext given to it by 'Uncle Olivier' and wallowed in by religious fans of his music are completely unnecessary, and a limitation upon one's ability to experience the work in its own right as fantastic and compelling music.

  I did 'borrow' a little 'something' from movement 7 of that cycle, though what I took away was a simplification into something in a particular mental improvisation that I quite often got into, suggestive of scary apparitions of tormented ghosts, with a clear inner nudging to the effect that this belonged in some future work of mine.

  Its moment came when I got composing the choral symphonic poem Tears of Avalokiteshvara, in which my 'scary tormented ghosts' became the musical core of the powerful and evocative hell scene, and, from my perspective, works brilliantly within the context of that work. It even includes a very brief and agonized octatonic fugue, which, in its second, more intense iteration culminates in a Vaughan Williams touch — a sudden out-of-the-blue full organ blast, signifying the insurmountable obstacle or final crushing blow.

Other works:

• Turangalîla Symphony

  Huge, and breathtakingly great fun, but, at least to my sensibility, having quite strong Satanistic resonance throughout. So, although I greatly enjoy a listen to it, I do so with a certain degree of circumspection, and a mild concern that many people would come under its spell a little more literally than they'd realize or wish, if only they understood what's really going on!

• Trois Petites Litanies de la Présence Divine

  An amazing piece for women's choir and a most unusual instrumental ensemble. The impression of joyfulness here sounds to me to be unnatural and ritualized — part of what has always sounded to me like some sort of witchcraft ritual rather than anything genuinely healthy — though with my current degree of self-actualization I can enjoy the funny side of it as I listen, recognising the likely untoward resonances but experiencing it as a somewhat humorous bit of theatre rather than something nasty in the woodshed that would try to suck me in. However, for most people such music would tend to be more problematical, whether or not they ever recognise that.

• Visions de l'Amen (for 2 pianos)

  A dazzlingly virtuoso and genuinely powerful piano work, but Messiaen's theologically derived titles for the seven movements, and his similarly theologically twisted commentaries upon them, are a pain up the butt and ensure that many, many listeners would never get a proper experience from this music because they'd be associating it with Messiaen's actually greatly limiting religion-based imagery.

  One is better-off without that religious baggage to experience and enjoy this and other Messiaen works to the full as 'absolute' music rather than as religious statements.

… Nonetheless, the odd later works have made a positive impression on me.

• Symphony 40
  

  Until I heard this symphony in my last year at grammar school I thought Mozart was of no interest to me at all — on the basis of the forced elegance of most of his music, which, although beautifully crafted, seemed to be deficient in human experience and vision. Initially I loved this symphony, but it wore thin on me through my hearing it too often to gain anything further significant from it.

• Requiem
  

  It wasn't till late 1976, in my first year at University, that I heard a bit of this on the radio and was amazed to learn that this powerful music was by Mozart. And then within a year or two, I was singing in it, as a member of the bass section of Exeter University Choral Society. I felt, and still do, more direct 'human' connection in that work than any of his other music apart from his unfinished Mass in C Minor.

  I used the odd quotes from this work in my Fantasy Variations — From the Scottish Mountains. However, ironically, at the very end, where my music dies down to a hushed and intense repeated declamation in the orchestra of a wordless 'Requiem aeternam', Mozart was nowhere in earshot! There was (in part) a very personal reason for that ending, and it had to come entirely from me.

• Pictures at an Exhibition (piano version)

• Pictures at an Exhibition (Ravel orchestration)

  This work may have helped predispose me towards thinking of my Symphony 5 as being my own 'Pictures at an Exhibition' — though it developed according to a musical structure that was unfolding from a starting point that I provisionally called Variations on a Wilderness theme, so actually 'pictures at an exhibition' concept wasn't in my mind till fairly well-on in the composition process, when Magritte Gallery came to me as the obvious title.

• Night on the Bare Mountain

  This is the widely-performed Rimsky-Korsakov revision of the work — though there appears to be some discussion around suggestions that although R-K did the donkey-work, it was based on revision suggestions from the composer himself. Either way, this is much more concentrated and flowing than the original, and is the sort of revision that I myself would no doubt have applied to the original if I'd been given the opportunity to make it more effective. The difference between the two versions is a remarkable parallel to that between the original and final version of Sibelius' symphonic poem En Saga. In both cases the original sounds to me like an early draft, awkward and lacking a sense of flow and direction — and indeed telling me fairly precisely what to do with it to make it 'work' properly!

  Actually in my 'formative' years this work never made a very big impression on me — probably because of its being still largely based in the major-minor tonal system, albeit with some whiffs of whole-tone scale at times, so it sounded a bit trivial and superficial.

  Actually, I'm pretty sure I could write an equivalent 'night on bare mountain' piece that would sound much more profoundly disturbing / Satanic — but no way would I attempt to — too unhealthy for me and for any listener! It would involve use of other modes than the familiar major and minor, and undoubtedly include the octatonic scale.

  Hey, what a thought! — Seeing that my works earn me virtually no money, how about some well-heeled public-spirited person paying me a tidy sum NOT to write the latter work?!

  I guarantee that I'd do a tremendous job of NOT writing it! — My donations / payments page is eagerly awaiting you!

• Symphony 4 (The Inextinguishable)

• Symphony 5

  There's one particular musical effect that occurs at one point in the first section of the first movement, which I 'borrowed', using it in one dramatic point in my Symphony 8 (The Ferryman), and also in the second movement of my Symphony 6 (K2 — A Song of Striving and Adventure). A loud snare-drum rim-shot coinciding with start of a loud triangle trill for a second or two. In the particular contexts where this is used, it's a really colourful and dramatic effect, suggestive of a hard impact breaking a glass window — or something similar.

  Also I transiently quoted in my own Symphony 5 (Magritte Gallery), as one of its many humorous elements, a snippet from Nielsen's '5th' first movement, where the side-drum first starts up, at that point with pizzicato lower strings giving a militaristic march-like effect. The quote so rapidly changes into something else that many listeners wouldn't have time to recognise it.

• Commotio for organ

  An amazing change of direction in his composing — a major organ work firmly based in the tradition of Bach and Buxtehude, yet still with the voice of Nielsen.

• Suite, Op. 45 for piano

  This may take a few listens to attune to. It has a disconcerting objectivity about it, reminiscent of some Beethoven piano sonatas, but more so, so that at first it may seem too cool and 'antiseptic' and lacking in 'feeling'. But certainly for me, over time it has grown in its effectiveness. It has a steely character that is suggestive of a certain quality in his Symphony 4, and likewise it has an enduring inspiring quality about it — perhaps more so even than the symphony (i.e., for the really well-attuned listener).

… I say this despite finding a great beauty in his music after he'd left behind his early dissonant 'modernistic' musical utterances.

There's undoubtedly a rather Pärt-like sound initially in my Symphony 7 (Ancient Cry for Freedom), but in this case I'm fairly sure that any 'nudge' from his music would have been pushing at a wide-open door, and thus most likely would have been irrelevant to my music!

I say that for a very specific reason. While composing that symphony I got the strong impression of composing a work that I had already heard a very long time ago (i.e., very long before I was born). By the latter I do NOT mean in human history here on Earth, either. It would have had to be in a different solar system, and may even have been in a different universe (i.e., if indeed there are or have been other universes — something completely unknowable to any of us)! I've had this impression from certain of my other works too.

Re-creating works from long before Earth existed?
My understanding, from my own inner inquiry and seeking to make the best sense of all my observations, is that it's fairly common for a small proportion of other composers and indeed artists in other fields to get a similar impression, of re-creating an artistic work that must have been created before civilizations had developed on Earth (because it's too 'advanced' to have been composed further back in human history here on Earth).

The suggestion is indeed that these impressions generally come from an aspect of deeper consciousness that I call fundamental memory, and do indeed relate to a much earlier work something very like the new work, which would have been composed usually in pre-Solar-System times and even theoretically 'before' this universe. I put 'before' in quotes here, because actually a chronological relationship between different universes, if indeed they exist or had ever existed, would be a meaningless concept, at least, from our viewpoint!

Only very open and aware people would get such conscious impressions from fundamental memory. They would be genuine past life memories, but NOT in the way that people usually mean, and there's no way to tell who was the original person who had the experience that was now being 'remembered', nor indeed who had composed a 'remembered' music work. These impressions are quite different from traditional-style past-life memories that people who've had previous soul incarnations would be carrying.

The passing-on of particular compositions like that isn't an exact reproduction, though inevitably sometimes a remarkable likeness may be created (and thus a more vivid 'memory' be triggered). Generally it's more the essentials rather than every detail that get re-created, each time with the new composer's 'take' on it. This I understand to operate independently of deep-level templates — though in practice it would be rather an academic question as to whether a particular current work is derived from fundamental memory or from a deep-level template.

Generally those that come from fundamental memory would have originated from some sort of deep-level template anyway somewhere up the line — and the memory impressions would each be functionally a template anyway.

• Cantus In Memoriam Benjamin Britten

  This could well have been a nudging influence towards my eventual use of multi-layered canonic structures, in which different layers are running at different speeds, and possibly also towards my giving a sense of ritual by use of tubular bells / antique cymbals (opening of my Symphony 7).

• Miserere

  I know of no connections between this and any music I've written, but it's the music work I had in mind in Chapter 17 (Miserere mei (The lost chord)) in my novel Still Life With Strangled Porcupines (WTF???! ), where something goes decidedly awry with the organ during the performance of that work in Tetchborough Cathedral.

… However, my getting to know his music may have been a predisposing factor towards my later adventures in using particular combinations of precision-tuned wind chimes in my Wind Chimes in the Wild recording project. Indeed in 2023 I produced a compelling work of likely unique nature, in which bamboo wind chimes came to sound remarkably like an ensemble of some of Partch's custom bamboo instruments.

• Delusion of the Fury

  There's a tiny very deliberate misquote from this work in two places in my 6th novel, Forbidden Flood Warning. Not a musical quote actually, but from the desolate pleading from the dead prince's spirit, You are not my enemy! …Pray for me, oh, pray for me again!. I left out the 'Pray for me!' bit and stuck with 'You are not my enemy!' — except, uniquely, hilariously appropriately, the final letter of 'enemy' was something else, while apparently still meaning 'enemy'! If you want to see how that works in context, you have no option but to read the whole of that novel!

• Gloria

  I got to know this well, through singing in it a few times as part of the bass section of Exeter University Choral Society.

• Organ Concerto

• Aubade

• Symphony 1 (Classical Symphony)

  A short and elegant neoclassical work — a beautiful 20th century version of a Haydn-type symphony, untroubled and full of sunshine.

• Symphony 3 (nicknamed 'Fiery Angel' Symphony after the opera from which its music is derived)

  What a contrast from Symphony 1! — A 'dark' and terrifying work. The opera The Fiery Angel, from which this music has been adapted, portrays a scenario of delusion, sorcery and dark practices in 16th Century Germany. I regard it as very unhealthy to listen to or perform in, because of the nature of the story it takes one through.

  Despite that, the derived symphony can be listened to much more as 'absolute' music, and can thus be a positive and constructive experience, provided that one sufficiently distances oneself from its opera-derived subtexts, and one doesn't go listening to it frequently.

  I took the six-note ostinato motif that opens the symphony to use in various adaptations in several sections of the final movement of my Symphony 4 (Highland Wilderness).

• Peter And the Wolf (a popular children's musical story — version with narration)

• Seven, They Are Seven

  An astounding immensely thrilling short cantata for tenor soloist, choir and large orchestra, which to my sensibility sounds little short of apocalyptic in its vision and intensity. I heard this just a couple of times on the radio, but it was presumably not available on any record label in this country back then, and I largely forgot about it, except the title and the sense of a seemingly hysterical repetition of phrases including 'seven'. It was only in 2022 that something prompted me to go to YouTube to listen to it again, and motivated me at once to add it to this list here.

  In terms of content, this sits comfortably together with his The Fiery Angel, Symphony 3 and Scythian Suite as being one of his 'dark'-preoccupation works.

  That title, therefore, with the associated hint of memory about the work, came to me spontaneously to be the title of Chapter 14 in my sixth novel, Forbidden Flood Warning (The Bishop's Little Wet Dream).

  This cantata is all the more astounding when you realize that its composition closely followed that of the so charming and elegant Classical Symphony. To say they're worlds apart is surely big understatement!

• Scythian Suite

  Like Symphony 3, this is a spectacular evocation of 'dark' imagery, but here it's totally mythical (pagan gods / goddesses) and thus easier for the listener to keep emotionally distanced from its subtext. It's also widely regarded as being Prokofiev's answer to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Many spectacularly unusual and effective orchestral sonorities.

• Alexander Nevsky

  An amazing highly dramatic cantata for choir and orchestra, with an opening that's surely one of the most arresting and hauntingly memorable that one could hear in Western classical music.

• Prelude in C-Sharp Minor (for piano)

  This was the very first work of Rachmaninov that I knowingly heard — through my hearing a couple of excerpts of it when I was a young boy, in a children's story record (78rpm shellac, back then) entitled Sparky's Magic Piano. I was struck by the emotional intensity and pain in the music — almost shocked (in a constructive way) that he'd managed to express that pain so openly.

  No doubt that was one of my first experiences that helped motivate me towards writing intense music myself. Indeed, maybe even Sparky's Magic Piano overall gave me a little motivational nudge — though what a pity that it didn't succeed in motivating me to enthusiastically carry through with the piano lessons that my parents got me having for a while till I objected so strongly that they desisted! With a certain physical clumsiness I'd never have made a concert-standard pianist, but just to be able to play the piano reasonably well would have made things much easier for my musical development — and would very likely have given me at least some credibility as a composer to the world at large, who pretty well consistently ignores / disregards my work for any number of non-musical reasons. In particular, with reasonable pianistic ability I could have composed a fair number of solo piano works and, with any luck more or less managed to play them for others to hear.

• Variations On a Theme of Corelli (for piano)

  An intriguing piece in its pretty unremitting combination of a certain eeriness and a strong sadness. That morbid fear of death hangs like a cloud over the work. The basic theme, incidentally, is apparently not by Corelli at all.

  Despite this work's problematical aspects I've always regarded this as a particularly beautifully composed and plain beautiful creation. Just best not to listen to very frequently if one values one's mental health!

  I got to know this sometime in my late teens when my father went through a phase of getting to grips with it on the piano. His real stumbling block was Variation 7, though I think he did more or less manage to battle his way through the other virtuoso variations, probably at a lower speed than concert pianists would take, and with a lot of stops to repeat particular phrases in attempts to get them right.

• Symphonic Dances

  Again that eerie morbid dread pervades this orchestral work, and, as with the Corelli Variations, this is strong enough to stand above the problems. Again, listening to this at all often would be fairly unhealthy.

• Vespers (All-Night Vigil)

  A greatly impressive choral work, exquisitely beautiful, which still stands up magnificently for those who disregard the religious aspect and listen to it as 'absolute' music. It is notionally a devotional work, but, as with certain of my own works that contain devotional chanting, the most healthy performing and listening standpoint is that of regarding a performance of the work as a picture of devotion rather than itself being an act of devotion.

  Here again we have Rachmaninov's anxieties and fears about death hanging like a cloud over the proceedings. Indeed, all the sections sound at least to my ears to have a quite marked anxiety about them. His own fears are, I suppose, being allowed to channel through the religious universalization of that fear, so we're hearing too the general fear of judgement and the threat of damnation by their imaginary — i.e., nonexistent — 'God'.

  I've mentioned in the introductory section of this essay a review of my music, which, after having found supposed influence of Arvo Pärt in my Symphony 7, claimed Elsewhere the influence of Rachmaninov’s Vespers, in their dramatic impulse as well as their spiritual ethos, is undeniable.

  — Which is complete rubbish, because the reviewer was noticing what he felt to be a similarity — not in actual sound, because he said so further on —, but in certain attributes / qualities of my music, and he automatically patronizingly claimed that what he took to be similarities were 'influences'. He simply didn't have the balls to stand up and say outright something like This Philip Goddard guy has really 'got something' and has produced strongly individual and arresting works, without any reference to imaginary 'influences'!

  For the record, I'd never felt any urge to take anything from Rachmaninov's works. My own music has its own intrinsic vividness, which can often be viewed as intensity. That resulted from the deep-level templates I was using, combined with the depth and vividness of my own life experience. I'm sure Rachmaninov's most inspired works had a high proportion of deep-level template input, and so hence their own strength and vividness.

• Cantus Arcticus
  

  Here the composer has tapped into a combination of deep-level template and actual individuals' and whole civilizations' deep-level memories in creating the work, and so his choice of sonorities and the recorded bird sounds and the way they'd been processed have created a powerfully evocative work. For me, I always get from it a sense of it being like an audio postcard from somewhere that was my homeland an immensely long time ago.

• Sonatine (for piano)

• Le Tombeau de Couperin (original version, for piano)

• Mother Goose Suite (piano solo version)

• Bolero (for orchestra)

  I got to know this when I was very young indeed, because my father had a record of it (shellac, 78 rpm — this was before LP records came in —, so the sound quality was dire). Its insistent repetitions of the same tune and rhythmic motif over and over but with different instrumentations, and progressively building up to the climax where it all flies apart to conclude the piece, fascinated me, even though I also found the repetitions a bit tedious.

• Introduction and Allegro for Harp, Flute, Clarinet and String Quartet

• L'Enfant et les Sortilèges (opera)
  

  I wanted to avoid the visuals, but this staged production was the YouTube example I found that gave a summary of the opera's 'action', together with English subtitles. A lot of the music wouldn't make sense to a non-French speaker without some assistance.

  The bare fifths of the opening of this, and similar sonorities elsewhere in some of Ravel's works, probably helped predispose me to a similar effect in some of my works — especially in my Symphony 2 (Idyll, Chorale and Dance). However, in works beyond that symphony there was usually an additional whole octave added to the fifth, to give a clear effect of the upper note being a harmonic of the lower one — effectively to have a similar sound to that of using the nazard mutation stop on an organ. In other words then I wasn't thinking 'Ravel', but in terms of appearing to modify the sound of the lower note, as is done regularly on the organ.

  That in turn, no doubt together with other aspects of my sonorities, has convinced some people that certain works of mine that don't use an organ are actually using one at times — e.g., in my Symphony 7 (Ancient Cry For Freedom). That's fine by me, and tells me that I was doing some things right!

• Persian Surgery Dervishes

  There was a period, mostly in 1973, when I had sessions of listening to this Persian Surgery Dervishes double-vinyl album, not understanding that it was actually compounding my problems. It sounds so confoundedly beautiful, but it's an extended series of a melodic motif repeating over and over, with only small variations.

  However, despite that, I actually picked up two inspirational details from it. The first was the actually unhealthy ungrounded inner vision I had during my first session of listening to that music, which formed the basis of my first ever venture into writing poems. The particular poem was long, rambling and unstructured, and I eventually discarded it along with many others, but my writing that one had broken a mental logjam, and I then started writing more focused poems (themselves owing nothing to Terry Riley), a small proportion of which still remain after various purges over the years, and is now available in a paperback volume entitled The Horizon Watcher.

  The other 'takeaway' was the repeating melodic motif in Part 1 of that double album. When I started composing the Monument and Reflections flute-and-piano sketch in 1978 I had just that title and two very different scales in mind, one of which was a sad Japanese-sounding scale, which I based on a simplification of that Terry Riley ostinato motif. One hears that quasi-ostinato in various places in the work, which much later on (1995) became my Symphony 3 (Dark Forest — Monument and Reflections). However, I doubt very much whether anyone not having read this note here would imagine that I'd taken anything from Riley at all!

But then, round-about my coming of age, my father obtained and got playing (struggling with, in the case of the second prelude) a bit of Respighi piano music called Tre Preludi su Melodie Gregoriane (Three Preludes on Gregorian Chant), which wasn't only beautiful but gave me shivers up the spine in a way that his orchestral music hadn't. Then some 12 years later, once I was a free agent, having left the family nest, I found a record of a four-movement orchestral work by Respighi called Church Windows, which astonished me by turning out to be an orchestration of those three preludes, with an additional final movement.

While I enjoyed and was affected positively by both the Preludes and the orchestral work, I still get a deeper experience from the former. Not only the more bell-like sonorities of the piano, but because the lavish, albeit brilliantly effective, orchestration feeds me too much superficial information, and dulls my listening creativity with regard to the musical essence of the work. It's like seeing the movie version of a book; however well it's done and popular and highly acclaimed it may be, the book version still wins hands-down for me — the visuals being a distraction from the deeper and more meaningful experience.

It could well be that these two works and the well-known Respighi symphonic poems had a background influencing effect towards how my Symphony 5 (Magritte Gallery) worked out. Not at all the unique structure of that symphony, but the detached portrayal of a variety of images and dramas, as though they were pictures in a gallery. Definitely something a bit in common there — though my Symphony 5's idiom is free from the hint of sugary syrup I sense in Respighi's soundworld, and sharper-etched, and, I'd venture to say, more vivid in its colour contrasts and dramas. — Vive le difference, though!

• Tre Preludi su Melodie Gregoriane (for piano)

• Vetrate di Chiesa (Church Windows) (for orchestra, with organ in movements 2 and 4)

• Trittico Botticelliano (Botticelli Triptych) / Three Botticelli pictures (for orchestra)

… I'm pretty sure that what was really happening there was that my own deepest aspects were pointing me to the real underlying heroic element in the template I was starting to draw from, and using my memory of heroic elements in Rosenberg's symphonies as a sort of 'reminder icon'. Although that heroic element didn't really become apparent in that three-movement duet, when that expanded to become my Symphony 1, those seeds were already there and instantly germinated and opened out and pointed to the symphony's overall direction.

• Symphony 2

  This Rosenberg symphony was my prime focus of interest despite its problems. The heroic aspect of the symphony's idiom was so much of the time countered by a drab soundworld. And during the periods of drabness quite a lot of dramatic gestures were made, but they seemed forced and not to be a genuine working-out of a musical conflict between that drabness and the heroic elements.

  When composing the aforementioned flute / descant recorder sketch The Wanderer, which was much later to be elaborated and extended to become my Symphony 1, during the early part of the 'search' in the first of the three movements I had the idea to include there something like the quite grand 'weary homecoming' build-up as the Rosenberg symphony was drawing to its end. However, what I was actually composing at that point didn't let that happen, which was actually just as well, because it couldn't have made sense so early in my work.

  Also, just beyond that point, still within the 'search' section, I sought to include some heroic phrases like ones I'd heard probably in another Rosenberg symphony — most likely his Symphony 4. However, as I was trying to do that with only single melodic lines I wasn't writing down anything particularly heroic-sounding, though those phrases still sort-of worked there in musical terms.

  But then in 1995, when I was at last expanding all that into my symphony, with multiple instruments involved, I found to my great surprise that those would-be heroic phrases quickly developed into something that really did sound heroic, even though without quite the 'blaze-of-glory' sort of effect I remembered from whichever Rosenberg work it was. Actually, such a real 'blaze of glory' effect there would have been inappropriate anyway, because that was a 'first discovery' within the 'search', and any stronger power needed to be reserved for later on in my symphony (i.e., in the final movement, where the first-movement heroic ideas are explored in depth). — And of course, I was hardly wanting to be sounding like a different composer from myself anyway, so I was suitably thrilled at what I did achieve!

… I was immediately wanting to add that scale to my armoury of musical 'devices' that I might use, such time as I ever got actively composing. But then I heard the odd other works of Rütti that were also at least largely in that scale, and I found them disappointing, not because they were poor works but because then I was learning of the limitations of keeping to that scale. Basically, to my ears those other works sounded much too similar to sections of Buch der Bilder. Indeed I'd previously encountered that scale without recognising it, in sections of Olivier Messiaen's music. Yes, it was one of Messiaen's 'modes of limited transposition'.

In the case of Messiaen the limitations of the octatonic scale were not showing, because Messiaen worked with a whole range of 'interesting' scales. As I got listening to (and singing in) a lot of different works, I saw how the octatonic can come up naturally in the composition process to give a certain dramatic or atmospheric effect, but would generally be rather crippling to dwell upon for a whole work.

Indeed, even in my little c. 1978 flute duet sketch that eventually became my Symphony 1, the first movement has a couple of very brief incursions into 'octatonic', without my ever having thought I'll use the octatonic scale here or indeed recognising those incursions as being into any particular named scale. I simply worked by my template-driven intuition and sensitive 'inner ear'. Likewise, my symphonic poem Golgotha to Rozabal has quite a lot of octatonic, including a striking ethereal choral fugue near the end, using the arched melody that had first appeared near the beginning.

I still don't know (haven't spent time to look closely) whether that melody is 100% octatonic, and to be honest, I don't give a monkey's as to whether it is or isn't, for the important point is that when composing the work I simply put down what made best musical sense to me, and no labels were necessary. I did work out, though, that the strange scale of my Music From the Mountain Waters could be seen as the octatonic with two notes missing, giving it a very special character with more potential than being stuck into 'straight' octatonic.

…late in that period I came across an album by the jazz guitarist Terje Rypdal, (What Comes After), which contained a track that I found fascinating, for its gentle rhythmic drive with various off-beat accents, which gave me an immediate sense that I wanted to use that somehow as the basis of some work of my own. Not as copyright infringement of course, but allowing some essence of it to distil into some composition of mine, if I ever managed to start actively composing. After I sold off my non-classical records I didn't precisely remember that music — it was the overall effect that I remembered.

While I was studying at Exeter University in 1976–79, I did laboriously compose a few duet sketch-works that were tips of considerable icebergs. The second of those was a three-movement duet for flute and descant recorder (or piccolo of course), which I called The Wanderer, which in 1995 grew into my Symphony 1 (Sagarmatha). Its second movement I decided to base on my hazy memory of that Rypdal track — not melodically as far as I know, because I was working with fresh melodic motifs as I composed that piece — and it worked out just right.

For the record (sic), I just listened online (in January 2021) to some clips from early Rypdal, and considerably warm to them now, even though I always find the sound of an electric guitar at least rather unpleasant. I did manage to identify what must have been the Rypdal track (Icing) that prompted the basis of my Symphony 1 movement 2, and I'm amazed at the difference, even feeling some uncertainty as to whether I'd got crossed wires, and was even remembering a track of somebody else's as being on that Rypdal album. Surely nobody would imagine that anything in that movement of mine (or elsewhere in my oeuvre) owed anything at all to Rypdal! I think it was just the quiet off-beat accents that had grabbed my attention and associated Icing with some deep-level memory or template right back then in the early or mid-1970s.

For me that's quite funny, because I'd felt a little guiltily self-conscious about that music, feeling that I was perhaps not being as genuine as I really wanted to be in that movement. — And now I find that in fact that track of Rypdal's (or whoever else's it really was) had simply given me a nudge that caused something else and properly appropriate to come up for me and more or less immediately to replace the Rypdal memory, and to be the real thing that I was feeling an urge to use in a future composition if I ever got properly composing! That's a nice validation of my rock-solidity as a composer even back then when I was valiantly struggling to get my first few sketchy compositions down onto paper in the late 1970s.

• 4 Impromptus, Op. 90

• 4 Impromptus, Op.142

• Symphony 8 (Unfinished)

• Carnaval

• Etudes Symphoniques

• Waldszenen

• Kreisleriana

• Kinderszenen

… So, what was going on there to draw me in like that, yet to cause a purposeful inner disconnection from it after each listening? Indeed, my inner response to almost everything of his that I've heard has been similar, albeit generally less strong for his less 'up-front' or 'extreme' works.

Well, to start with, nowadays I recognise his music as generally not only mystical in its 'vision' (as widely recognised), but in having moderate to strong Satanistic and indeed hell resonances. It's primarily those resonances that prompt my own deepest aspects to gently disconnect me from the music after I'd been listening and started connecting with it in unhealthy ways (as almost anyone in our dysfunctional civilization would).

… And yet it's such beautiful and constructively challenging music too — hence its strong 'drawing' force when one listens to it.

In those works I've listened to I do find my attention starts to weaken part-way through, with a sort of 'shell-shock', as there is so much going on, yes, but it's within a seemingly timeless 'canvas', which seems to me not to be going anywhere much. Listening to a lot of that sort of music can thus be harmful to our mental health, not only through cultivating internal Satanistic resonances, but also in a dulling and closing of our awareness — training oneself to 'just experience' and to inhibit active thinking.

We need to be aware, too, that ALL focusing on ecstasy, and particularly aiming for it, is seriously harmful. It's not that ecstasy is bad, but it is seriously problematical for us to whatever extent we are attached to it or are desiring it. When we simply enjoy an ecstasy and simply let go of it as it passes, and draw a line under it, it's great. Otherwise, it's generally a BIG problem.

• Poem of Ecstasy
  

• Prometheus, The Poem of Fire

• Black Mass Sonata: Piano Sonata No. 9
  

• 24 Preludes & Fugues

  I got to know these as my father played most of them at some time or other on the piano during my teens. Although they're a great achievement, I came to be disenchanted with them because of their emotional colouring, which was the composer's own rather than something more inspiring stirred up by more deeply-sourced music such as Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier or The Art of Fugue.

• Symphony 4

  I've explained on my Clarity of Being site how this appears to be possibly the only one of Shostakovich's symphonies that significantly taps deeper levels of consciousness — his awareness appearing to be generally relatively shallow so that normally he was more or less operating in the level of 'ordinary mind', and so preoccupied with his feelings and all sorts of political agenda rather than anything much deeper.

  I strongly suspect that the unique quality of this symphony, which has mystified musical commentators so much, arises from his having unawarely delved deeper and tapped a type of hell experience, in a category that I've named 'second-level hells', of which I've had much direct experience, as related in the long explanation of hells linked to from the latter-linked Glossary entry. I do actually mention this work in that account and explain a bit more what I think was probably going on there for this symphony to work out the way it did. My own much leaner Symphony 3 (Dark Forest — Monument and Reflections), although being worlds apart from this symphony, appears to be much more clearly identifiable as portraying a particular type of second-level hell experience.

• En Saga

  An early symphonic poem, which is brimming in vitality and a sense of adventures and big dramas out in the Nordic wilderness.

  Please note that in recent years a lot of prominence has been given to promoting the 'original' version of this work over the final revision by the composer. The two versions are very different, and I side squarely with the composer and his revision, because if that first version were mine, I too would have edited it similarly.

  He clearly recognised that the first version didn't really flow well and have a really effective 'action plan', and made an excellent job of rectifying the situation. Sometimes composers (or, more commonly, publishers) do make adverse revisions where the original was already just right, but that wasn't the case here. The earlier version is simply an interesting historical document

  The same is also true of the 'original' version of Sibelius' 5th Symphony, which again sounded to me like a draft rather than a finished work.

• Kullervo Symphony (pre-dates Symphony 1)

• Symphony 4

  The dark brooding quality of movements 1–3 are an amazing precursor of elements of the final movement of my own Symphony 4 (Highland Wilderness). However, I'd keep very clear of any notion of 'influence' here, as usually meant, because this Sibelius 'Fourth' itself was reflecting the odd dark brooding improvisations that were already in my mind at times — indeed, I already had specific intent that if I ever managed to get actively composing, something from those improvisations would get used at times in one or more of my works. Undoubtedly, though, Sibelius' 'Fourth' was a wonderful reinforcer for me.

  — And of course — I would say it, wouldn't I! — the dark brooding elements in my own 'Fourth' worked out independently of external influences because of a combination of deep-level template and in this case a really quite noxious narrative that was building up from the variety of ghosts' embedded memories out there on Rannoch Moor. Considering what I was dealing with and trying to make sense of there, I did a bloody great job in drawing all that together to produce such a meaningful and indeed beautiful whole — no matter how many or few people actually like what I produced!

• Symphony 5

• Symphony 6

  A quiet haunting passage in the second movement, suggestive of birds answering each other in a forest, has a certain resemblance to an idea that appears a few times in my Symphony 3 (Dark Forest — Monument and Reflections). Although the particular idea's appearances in the original Monument and Reflections duet was worked out without any thought of this Sibelius music, when I came to develop that into the symphony and so chose to pass phrases from the melodic line to different woodwind instruments, I saw the similarity at once, and strengthened that effect, as it was very much part of the subtext story emerging in the new symphony — and then that section re-emerges later on in multiple canon, sounding for all the world like a mysterious and rather ghostly dawn chorus in the forest.

  Also, my Fantasy Variations — From the Scottish Mountains has a section that in places has echoes of the odd part of the first movement of this symphony. In that work, as with my Symphony 5 (Magritte Gallery), I'd let loose a certain playfulness that allowed various quotes and allusions to emerge in places, often quite humorously.

• Tapiola

  It's likely that this terse and uncompromising nature poem, along with the less up-front and hauntingly moody Egdon Heath by Gustav Holst, both of which affected me deeply, helped predispose me towards producing my own unique terse and uncompromising musical nature poem, which is Music From the Mountain Waters. It doesn't sound remotely like either Sibelius or Holst — though it's closer to Tapiola in its elemental severity and its adherence to just two melodic elements, both of which are on one scale (in this case the octatonic scale missing two notes and thus containing a major and a minor third), giving it a certain deliciously hectoring quality.

  Also, here and there in my output are passages with a harmonization that sounds as though it could have stepped straight out of Tapiola. In none of those cases was I thinking 'Tapiola' till I heard what I'd worked out on-screen, and in each case it was a short passage or phrase imbued with a strong sense of anxiety. This happened in my Symphonies 4 (m2), 5, and 6 (m3), and maybe elsewhere that I don't remember just now.

• Lemminkainen Legends, including The Swan of Tuonela

• Finlandia

That makes perfect sense, because, generally speaking, those who are really deeply-connected composers get on with composing fresh and vibrant works, and have no particular motivation nor indeed time to operate as music critics / commentators — at least in any major way. That leaves those who themselves are not so 'deeply connected' to do the commentating and adjudicating upon the music of others.

So, unfortunately, those who would make the best music commentators / critics tend instead to be the more inspired composers, who in practice tend to be on the receiving end of the various commentaries and judgements from the rather less inspired commentators / critics. As the cliché goes, Those who can, do; those who can't, teach! ('teaching' in this case including artistic commentary and criticism / reviewing). Maybe that's too sweeping a generalization of course, but it still describes a real and pronounced tendency.

One work of Simpson's did come over to me as quite impressive, though even there I felt at the end of each listening, that something vital was missing, leaving it all feeling a bit contrived, still with this sense of the whole symphony as being more of an intellectual journey rather than coming from some deeper life experience. That work is:

• Symphony 9
  

  Unfortunately there appears to be no YouTube video of this at the moment (apart from a single later section of the work — source not stated —, which isn't very meaningful out of context), so I'm not linking to it. I think the problem is that the recording of the symphony was issued by Hyperion, which I've noticed over the years appears to be much more restrictive than most record labels with regard to allowing even short preview excerpts to be put on websites, and I assume the company would have issued 'take-down' notices with regard to any Hyperion recordings appearing on YouTube. I'm thus not going to rip from my own CD of that recording and post it anywhere public.

• Organ Symphony 1

  While its tough musical idiom wouldn't endear it to many, to me it's compelling and thrilling throughout its c. 2 hours' duration, at times a really glorious tumult that takes one into realms of creative perception that are beyond understanding but yet somehow strongly meaningful.

• Opus Clavicembalisticum

  An astonishing solo piano work calling for mind-boggling virtuosity, and lasting 4–4½ hours — indeed so long that I couldn't find the time to listen to it in its fullness — i.e., in one sitting or anything like it. It is spectacular overall, though I did find that some sections drew themselves out as intellectual exercises and outstayed my welcome.

… One distinct characteristic of all I listened to of his was that, however beautiful or fascinating / intriguing, or otherwise engrossing the works were, I didn't feel much 'human connection' in any of them, so despite often enjoying the listen, I felt a sort of void in them, and didn't feel moved to keep returning to them, nor indeed very much to explore further works of his. This is in marked contrast to the music of Iannis Xenakis, many works of whom seemed to have that 'human connection' very strongly, beckoning me to return to them. No sense of a 'void' in Xenakis' works that I listened to, even in those that didn't seem to me so effective.

It appears to me that at least much of Stockhausen's issue was that his awareness was seriously weakly grounded, and his creative focus correspondingly scattered, so his awareness hadn't enough physical connectedness for his most deeply-seated creativity to come through really effectively, at least in any really 'human' way. I'm pretty sure he must have done a lot of meditation, which would have insidiously harmed him and still further ungrounded his awareness.

Indeed, looking at many photos of Stockhausen, I pick up a strongly discomforting impression of being faced with a mentally very unhealthy individual, who's very considerably out of touch with his underlying nature and has built up very much a charismatic false persona — the latter being much cultivated by his waywardly scattered approach to music composition, always underpinned by that aforementioned 'void'.

• Hymnen

  This video claims to be unavailable, except that if you click on it, it plays! I think there must have been some sort of copyright claim on it, which has been resolved but the info on the video hasn't been updated.

  It's of a BBC radio broadcast, so there are applause and announcements between main sections ('Regions'). Be warned that it's long, and the more interesting material (to my perception) is all subsequent to Region 1.

• Trans

• Stimmung

• Gesang der Jünglinge

• Kontakte

• Mantra

… Whatever 'teatime music' is supposed to sound like, it was clear that she was getting the same sort of impression from his style and musical persona as I was. In terms of idiom, a lot of that was communicated in his very quirky mid-phrase key changes, which sounded horribly contrived and suggested very much the projection of a false personality. The hugely vast majority of people (I mean all people, not just composers) do the latter, to varying extents, but the suggestion in this case is that Strauss was projecting a particularly strong false ID, including preoccupation with silly exaggerated gender stereotypes. No doubt these days he would be regarded as particularly sexist. I certainly picked up that impression from his music and the subjects of various of his compositions, and it always grated with me.

Notwithstanding that, I did enjoy a few of his works, though I'm not aware of any similarities between anything in his music and mine.

• Don Juan

• Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks
  

• Don Quixote

• Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus spake Zarathustra)

  I include this latter as one that I never got on with. I was all too conscious of this being suggestive of an expression of some sort of personal 'megalomania' — a contrived grandiosity, to my sensibility lacking in deep human connection. Its opening of course sounds 'impressive' first time, but still pretty corny even then, and overall, to me it has the sound of common or garden film music, which latter is replete with big and more or less empty gestures — and beyond that I've always found this work's musical material unmemorable and unmoving.

  So, this work could be counted among my 'anti-influences' — i.e., as one that points in a direction that's alien to me.

… However, in my Symphony 9 (Orb of Life and Death) there does emerge an idea that sounds quintessentially 'Stravinsky'. The catch is that that particular sound was a result of the way I'd put the choral and instrumental lines together, and I didn't know what it would sound like until I played it back in the MIDI sequencer program and experienced a 'goose-pimples' moment. Because that was such a striking sound, I brought it in again for more attention late in the symphony.

Although I'm pretty sure I'd not heard it in any Stravinsky work, I had, and still have, a strong impression of having heard it long, long ago. My understanding is that this is another case of my having picked up a truly ancient memory from fundamental memory, in addition to my working from a deep-level template. Such deep-level template based works would inevitably be the most likely ones to trigger 'fundamental memory' memories of very similar works based on the same template, or indeed a particular work from which the original template had been drawn.

• Petrouchka (1911 version, Leopold Stokowski & his orchestra in historical 1950 mono recording)

  This is the very recording that hit me like a bombshell in 1954 when I was in my early teens, and properly awoke my active musical interest. Note that the above-linked video displays a totally wrong cover image (even wrong composer)!

  Although I can't imagine anyone hearing any hints of this work in any of my music, I did 'borrow' from its final scene, using a humorous yet also quite chilling parody of that as one of the various sideshows in the Queen's Visit celebrations in Pewkely Snorton, in my first novel — The Hunting-Down of Michael Maus.

• Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring)
  

  Such an influential work for so many, yet I never connected all that much with it. The very disjointed nature of the music was part of what made me always a bit lukewarm to it, but not all. In any case, the portrayal of a ritual that culminates in a young woman dancing herself to death, as the ending of a work, without any humanitarian 'message' about it as you'd get in, say, a Janáček opera, was always distasteful to me, and seemed so mindlessly pointless.

• Symphony of Psalms

  In about 1979/80 I had the pleasure of singing in this work, in the bass section of Exeter University Choral Society. Considering what a mellow and beautiful piece of music this is — light-years away from the barbarism of The Rite —, it was rather horrifying how many choir members left the choir for that term or in some cases altogether, just so as to be spared singing that 'dreadful' music!

• Canticum Sacrum

• Symphony in Three Movements

• Agon

• Perséphone (conducted by the Composer; words in French; apparently no libretto available except with the CD)

  This is the version I got to know originally, and it made a deep impression on me. There is a deliberate little transient echo of one moment in this work just slightly before the 'storm' section of my Symphony 3 (Dark Forest — Monument and Reflections).

  • Perséphone (Staged; words and music much less clear, but there are English subtitles)

• Pulcinella

• Serenade in A (for piano)

• Symphonies of Wind Instruments

• Le Roi des étoiles (The King of the Stars — also known as Zvezdoliky)

  A terse visionary piece that always gives me tingles up the spine. The linked video is a more dramatic rendering than I've heard before, but I chose it here for the best clarity of all performances I've heard, and I do warm to its more dramatic and hard-edged quality. However, as I originally came to know the work, it was primarily its sense of hushed understatement that struck a deep note (sic) for me. So much so, that it was hovering over me as I conceived and composed what is nowadays titled Clarity of a Mountain Sunrise — though the idiom and subject of the latter work is very different.

… Compared with Scriabin, Szymanowsky's works that I heard all had a more open and airy character, though would still tend to lose my attention after a period of listening, no doubt because again there was a certain lack of the sense of time passing — a mystical mindset, with beautiful sonorities but the musical ideas not developing all that much to give much or indeed any sense of forward motion or narrative.

I'm not aware of any particular work or aspect of Szymanowsky's oeuvre that could have been influential in my own composing, but this was definitely a part of my musical background nonetheless.

• Stabat Mater

  This choral piece in particular would catch my attention every time I heard it come up on the radio.

• Études op 33 (for piano)

• Symphony No. 3 (Song of the Night)

  I'm not sure whether I heard that symphony or those Études prior to my composing, but they serve as good examples of the sort of music Szymanowsky comes out with.

…There would be no useful basis for claiming that Tallis in particular influenced my music, especially the symphonies. Rather, there would have been a certain 'nurturing' effect of a distillation from all early church music that I heard over the years. A lot of its 'influence' would have been pointing to things that wouldn't be worth my pursuing, even if they sound beautiful in their own way.

Even long before I found out the hard way the harmfulness of ALL spirituality, including ALL the religions, I didn't want to compose 'churchy'-sounding music, because I sensed that my own musical direction, to be genuinely useful and take people forward in healthy ways, needed to break out of such inward- and retro-looking orthodoxies and into a much more open, aware and flexible mindset that values constructive innovation and lets go of the pointless straitjacket of 'tradition', which is past and serves no useful function in the present.

• Spem in Alium

  A spectacular ceremonial motet written for 40 parts. At least, it really is spectacular with a significant-size choir in a large space such as a cathedral, and well spread out so that one hears the many antiphonal effects to best advantage.

• Some other motets

  A selection of more normal motets that I got to know.

• L'Orgue Mystique (example, out of a cycle of 51 short(ish) 5-movement organ suites):
  L'Orgue Mystique, No. 35 (a particular favourite of mine)

• Douze Préludes-Poèmes for piano solo

  The title of this suite of piano pieces is remarkably unassuming for what strikes me as a very major piano work — not necessarily as a big display of virtuosity but as a beautiful and quite haunting mystical 'journey' with both gentle contemplative aspects and highly dramatic sections, often getting almost bell-like sonorities from the piano.

  Okay, for our own mental health we need to disregard any mystical subtext, but the music is still a really great listen.

  In the final movement of my own work The Seen and the Unseen, the main melody has the odd turn of phrase that was prompted by somewhat similar turns of phrase in parts of this Tournemire work — though the melody as a whole doesn't at all suggest Tournemire, as it isn't plainsong-based as far as I'm aware.

… I'm not aware of any nudges I've had towards composing anything sounding at all like Tubin, BUT in the odd places in certain works of mine there are transient moments that do remind me a bit of certain moments in Tubin works.

It's mostly certain chord progressions that echo moments in Tubin's Symphony 4, though in the first movement of my own Symphony 6 I get the feeling that the start of the faster, skipping theme sounds to be a Tubin echo.

• Symphony 2 (The Legendary)

• Symphony 4 (Sinfonia Lirica)

  To me this is Tubin's most endearing and engaging symphony, which strongly deserves a place as a 'regular' in Western classical repertoire. Its particular modal colouring makes it stand out from the crowd as something of particular beauty — though of course I guess that its very differences are why the hugely vast majority (being 'sheep' of course) ignore it in favour of more familiar territory (— sigh!).

• Symphony 9 (Sinfonia Semplice)

• Symphony 10

  To me this is haunting but discomforting music. The sense of that lurking something that still doesn't get revealed / understood is particularly strong — but also to my sensibility this symphony has an almost painful sense of valediction, with no resolution at the end, apart from quietening down into an uneasy acceptance. He must surely have been near the end of his life when he wrote this, and feeling immensely sad that he hadn't 'grasped' and understood more in this lifetime. — But then again it could well be that he was simply unawarely picking up a particular primary archetype that contained such impressions and feelings.

… Unsurprisingly, therefore, in a number of my own works I used the odd VW motifs or scales — particularly where a certain storminess was required. However, usually where I did that, I was surprised to find that the end result didn't sound much or indeed at all like VW! — Which of course makes perfect sense if indeed I was using deep-level templates in my composition work.

Considering how much supposed VW has always been in my internal improvisations, it's really quite remarkable how little VW resemblance occurs in my composed oeuvre. Let's mention the ones that I remember off the top of my head, which seem to be from his music generally, with more specific references being listed against the respective VW works given below.

I used VW's general menacing stormy type of music most visibly in my choral song The Beginning And Also the End. I was perfectly happy to write in the idiom that best fitted the wild and stormy words, and 'stormy VW' fitted the bill just great. However, even there what emerged seemed at least to me to be more 'stormy me' within one particularly VW-like extreme of my own range of idiom.

In my Symphony 3 (Dark Forest — Monument and Reflections), I briefly used a particular 'stormy VW' bitonality in the short 'storm' episode.

My symphonic poem Golgotha to Rozabal started life as an early flute / piano duet sketch that I called Fantasia on a Theme of Ralph Vaughan Williams. I was quite bemused at how that initial sketch seemed to have a will of its own, and much of it, even using what I'd been thinking of as VW motifs, sounded not much like VW. Then, decades later, when I developed it into the symphonic poem, an actually recognisable VW sound was (partially) apparent only in the passages depicting the bloodthirsty lynch mob calling for 'Jesus' to be crucified. Even the iconic VW three-note motif of a descending semitone then minor third, which gives us our first climax in Golgotha to Rozabal, doesn't sound at all as though sourced from VW, because of its quite different context.

• Sea Symphony

• Symphony 3 (Pastoral Symphony)

• Symphony 4

  On its first performance it shocked the classical music world with its forthright stormy dissonances and gruff humour, but I loved it! Despite sounding very, very different, there are aspects of it and its approach to form and structure that always link in my mind with Beethoven's 5th Symphony.

• Symphony 5

  …And this one took the classical music world aback with its haunting serenity — a longing for peace in a wartime world (World War 2). This expressed so much of my own personal childhood longings for peace and consistency in that crazy world.

• Symphony 6

  …And another big surprise to the public when it came. Another stormy and highly dramatic work — but this time seeming to embody generalized recollections from the War, no matter what other subtexts the music would be carrying. Its hushed and haunting final movement is worlds away from the apparent serenity of Symphony 5 — more like a dazed state, anxiously waiting in a bomb shelter, emotionally seeking to lick the past and present wounds, just taking things as they come and not daring yet even to hope for better things.

  That symphony is certainly discomforting for me to listen to for its taking me back to the horrors and anxieties of wartime, even though I also love that vivid and evocative music.

• Symphony 7 (Sinfonia Antartica)

  The 'penguin' theme in movement 2 (a rocking descending theme in 6/8) may have prompted me to use a very similar idea in my Symphony 4 (Highland Wilderness), movement 1, and briefly returning in movement 3, and also quoted briefly in my Symphony 5 (Magritte Gallery).

  The one significant (and indeed crucial) difference between that theme in my and VW's versions is that in the 'Antartica' the theme was describing a series of augmented triads as it descended, whereas my version was describing a similar series of diminished triads in exactly the same way, giving a very different sound, its menacing effect intensified by a rising two-note chordal counter-motif on the violins immediately following it.

  Yes, the 'penguin' versions both sound menacing, but in very different ways. Diminished triads are quite a feature of some of my works, whereas I can't think of any VW work in his whole oeuvre where they come into sufficient prominence to colour a work (or movement of a work). I certainly wasn't picturing penguins or indeed anything specific physical when using that theme; rather, it was one of a number of musical bogeys in that haunted Knoydart landscape captured in movement 1 of my symphony.

  Another detail I took from this symphony (and also VW's Job — A Masque For Dancing) was VW's use of the full organ, not to augment the orchestral sound so much as to appear suddenly in opposition to it, as a depiction of the insurmountable obstacle or the ultimate catastrophe. In my Symphony 6 (K2 — A Song of Striving and Adventure) I used the organ for both — the insurmountable obstacle in movement 2 and the ultimate catastrophe in movement 3 — though because in the former case that insurmountable obstacle was in a type of hell realm, when it suddenly declaims with the same motif on the top of K2, the effect is particularly scary and gut-wrenching.

• Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis

• Mass in G Minor

  In 1976 I had the pleasure of singing in this work as a member of the bass section of Exeter University Choral Society. For some reason, the 'Gratias agimus' motif in the Gloria section stuck in my memory, and in 1978, when I was laboriously composing my Monument and Reflections flute+piano duet sketch, I was motivated to use it in one passage as what I felt to be a 'hero' motif, which so briefly cries out in a brief sense of triumph in its sudden self-recognition, then gets musically annihilated — a potentially deeply disturbing passage for particularly open and deeply aware individuals (it appears to connect with a particular primary archetype).

  In my Symphony 3 (Dark Forest — Monument and Reflections), derived and expanded from that sketch, the 'hero' motif appears in three different, widely separated passages, including in the very opening. However, nowhere does it have the context of VW-type modal harmonies that give it its particular character in the VW Mass.

• Sancta Civitas

• Riders To the Sea
  

  This is REAL opera! Forget all that shallow, pretentious Italian grand opera stuff , and get into this amazing elemental and stormy work! This video is of a film version of the opera, which I'd not encountered before, and I chose this because this was the only recording I found on YouTube with the characters' words sufficiently clear for one not to need libretto text to follow. In any case I give my strong thumbs-up to this film production, which I find greatly compelling despite my generally not caring for films, and the annoyance of zoomed-in faces, particularly of Maurya.

  I find close views of people's faces generally distasteful and intrusive in films / videos / TV except where they're really needed (e.g., in some news footage). If you were an observer in a real situation you wouldn't go right up to a person who is a particular focus of attention for a 'full-frame' close view of his/her face without some very special reason, surely, so it doesn't make sense to do that gratuitously in films / videos / TV productions either! It distracts attention too much away from the overall picture, quite apart from a certain personal violation involved.

  I used a motif from the Part 4 video, at the culmination of Maurya's electrifyingly climactic passage (cue in about 8:00, and it's where Maurya turns to the door, with the words …a track to the door). My use of it was in an apparently completely different context, in movement 2 of my Symphony 4 (Highland Wilderness), forming a major part of the basis of the whole central section apart from the occurrences of the imposing 'mountain theme', which always rises up aloof. You first hear it immediately following the first occurrence of the 'mountain theme' (cue in at 3:18 in movement 2).

  However, to what extent that motif in my symphony is really sourced from Riders to the Sea or simply was reminding me of its use there is a very moot point, for it appears to lie within a deep-level template that I was using, and it most likely has more to do with overlapping or partly common templates used by me and VW.

  In any case there's another aspect to that consideration, because it became clear to me on playback of the symphony once composed — especially the final movement — that it seemed to carry a deeply sourced and very likely unhealthy subtext that wasn't of my bidding, involving probably historical events particularly round about the time of the Glencoe atrocity, and also legends more tenuously derived from much older historical events in similar types of landscape that may have very much pre-dated Earth and therefore even our Solar System.

  So, that 'Maurya' motif might well have been used in the symphony as part of a thinly veiled evocation of all manner of historical human hardships and tragedies (actual and more or less mythical) in the often wild and unforgiving conditions in the Scottish Highlands.

  But then yet again, having considered all that, I subsequently returned to what I eventually had to recognise as the real primary source, or at least starting point, of the choral section of my Symphony 4 movement 2. Please see 'Ghosts' further below for the explanation I eventually came up with.

… But there is one work of his that at least runs a little deeper, which has quite widely been described as his greatest opera, even though it isn't classified as one, and that is…

• Messa da Requiem (i.e., the Requiem)
  

  I sang in this three or indeed even four times over the years in the bass section of Exeter University Choral Society. At a certain fairly superficial and unaware level this does come across to me as fairly compelling, but still at a hearing of any part of the work I've felt a certain inner deficiency in the music — a lack of really deep human connection. It's very much a 'Romantic' work — i.e., operating within the arena of transient emotions, with not much sign of anything deeper coming through.

  Anyway, this one has trickled just a little into two works of mine — one musical and the other literary.

  • I included allusions to little bits of the Dies Irae section in several sections of my Fantasy Variations — From the Scottish Mountains;

  • In my novel Still Life With Strangled Porcupines (yes, I know! ) one of the central characters is a member of what is a thinly disguised portrayal of Exeter University Choral Society when I myself was singing in Verdi's Requiem, although of course in my novel 'Verdi' is transformed into 'Vermicelli', and some decidedly unlikely events are occurring, which I'm very thankful never happened in my own real-life experience! I made quite a little joke out of the page number (174) where the Libera Me section starts in the choir's vocal scores (the same page number as in my real life experience with singing in Verdi's work), so if you've read that novel and then see that number in the subtitle of the following novel you'll no doubt do a double-take and be thinking 'WTF' or something!

    Also, the Lacrymosa section gets a bit of attention in the novel.

I doubt, however, if there was any obvious effect of his works on my own, apart from there being a strong Vivaldi effect in the very opening of my wind-and-strings nonet called Autumn Leaves and Spring Blossoms. That wasn't in the original duet I wrote in 1978 (for flute and tenor bowed psaltery, though all sorts of pairings would have done). However, I can't tell whether I'd have done that opening differently if I hadn't heard any Vivaldi works. Knowing the way I work, I expect it would have come out much the same, because it just worked so right in that context.

• Gloria

• The Four Seasons

… Am I saying Wagner's music is bad? — No, most certainly not, but with that music he is nonetheless transmitting to others a certain limited, alluring outlook, which dwells a lot on myth and romances of one sort or another, and, in Tristan and Isolde, the seriously toxic myth of the virtue or desirability of close attachment and any hint of 'love-death' or eternal attachment between people. Despite a lot of telling drama in his works, to me the whole lot is within a limited and inward-facing, unaware mindset, which to my sensibility is permeated by a sort of 'gloating' and often bombastic quality that is very anti-human.

• Siegfried Idyll
  

  Here we have an interesting piece (written as a birthday greeting for the Composer's second wife — to be played outside her bedroom to gently wake her on that birthday morning), full of what registers for me as his 'gloating' soundworld, which is repellent to me despite its (limited) beauty. His use of the augmented triad in 'cheesy' mode is really interesting, and shows how that chord, while generally being associated with fear, menace and indeed terror, can be used for (superficially) other effects.

  I think in this case the augmented triad is still communicating menace, but it resolves onto his cheesy harmonies to make them sound all the more cheesy. — But the cheesiness here tends to be the 'beauty' of make-up hiding the genuine beauty and inspiring quality of the real person. This is golden syrup to replace or at least seriously clog the inspiration one gets from the wind and rain, the hills and mountains, and the birds singing! — Yuck!!

  — End of rant!

  If I myself had a partner in his (sic) bedroom to serenade with music from outside, and was determined not to leave it purely to Mother Nature to do that, I'd have thought my refreshing little Autumn Leaves and Spring Blossoms would be an excellent contender, though if he'd done anything to incur my WRATH, perhaps the hell scene from Tears of Avalokiteshvara might fit the bill!
  — Just kidding — I hope…

… It seems to me that Walton's music — naturally including his Spitfire Prelude and Fugue — served a rather similar function for us here in the UK to Sibelius' Finlandia in Finland at the time of its composition — albeit in not such a focused way.

• Belshazzar's Feast

  I sang in this three times in Exeter choral societies, each time as a member of the bass section. I'm not aware of any musical resemblances to anything in my own output, but certain details of it have got adapted into particular novels of mine — most notably the sixth novel — Forbidden Flood Warning (The Bishop's Little Wet Dream), where I used something else more appropriate and indeed more emotive in place of the famous 'Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin' ('Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting')!

• Symphony 1

  I heard this work sometimes on the radio back in the 1950s, and a certain Sibelius-like quality of its intensely energetic first movement was what really made an impression on me — the very quiet sidling-in of the main 'theme' motif, which eventually sings out late in that movement and always would bring shivers up the spine. And yet somehow the symphony as a whole never really 'made it' for me.
  
  I think the problem was Walton's fixation on creating tension all the time, taking attention away from an overall musical development or 'story-line'. The first movement did have the latter a bit, but still the main substance of that movement appeared to be little or no more than generating tension and excitement, without it leading onto anything much to warrant that excitement — well, except when the Sibelius-style theme motif eventually sang out.

  I'd say it was a tactical error of Walton in the first place to put the most effective and dramatic material in the first movement (or maybe indeed to continue beyond that first movement), for whatever followed was then bound to be something of an anticlimax in sheer musical terms. He followed his mighty fling in the first movement by two movements with little sense of meaningful musical argument, at least, that was at all obvious to me — just dramatic creation of tension and excitement — and then he had difficulty in working out the final movement. Although appealing and quite inspiring music (with a distinct 'quality film music' character), what he finally came up with sounded just stuck on, not relating in any really meaningful way to the musical argument or indeed the character of the rest of the symphony.

  If I myself had composed that first movement from my current, relatively informed, viewpoint, I'd have seriously considered changing tack and making it the finale, and then arranging a musical argument through however few or many movements were required, to lead meaningfully up to that.

  When I was composing my own Symphony 1 (Sagarmatha), when an inspiring and clearly important heroic idea came up in the first movement, I deliberately didn't make a big meal of it then, and let the musical 'search' run into obstacles, for I intuited at once that maxing it up then would destroy the prospective symphony as a really meaningful and inspiring work. Instead, I got working with it in the final movement, working through with a whole journey of discovery, still with difficulties along the way, but inspiringly irresistible.

  It's likely indeed that Walton's Symphony 1 was quite influential for me, in being a cautionary tale about the consequences of putting all one's really good eggs in that first movement, and the great advantages of having strong motivic development following through the whole work, and of being sparing with tension-generation, so that it always has maximal meaning with minimal effort, and can be graded up towards a key event with maximal effect.

• Scapino — A Comedy Overture

• Spitfire Prelude and Fugue

… From late August 2023 I started producing at an amazing rate a whole series of a pioneering type of music creation (which I called Nature-Symphonies), which consisted of field recordings of mine of various wind chimes, or ensembles of them hung out in the wild, or occasionally just particular natural soundscapes, that I had transformed, generally by slowing them down, so substantially reducing pitch, and adding a strong reverb — usually a back-of-cathedral acoustic. These were consistently turning out to be powerful musical entities, with a strong elemental and visionary quality about them.

What I quickly came to recognise was that they were close equivalents to many of Xenakis' works that were generated from probabilistic structures and processes. The fundamental difference between his works and mine was simply that he himself created those structures and processes to mimic natural processes and indeed 'Mother Nature', whereas this here lazy good-for-nothing Philip guy simply let 'Mother Nature' — a whole behemoth of probabilistic (aka stochastic) structures and processes — do that task for him!

I still had some degree of input into these works, for it required a 'deeply connected' sort of awareness that could recognise the most effective ways to deploy, process and indeed combine recordings to make a fully satisfying and effective work. One would need to be exceptionally attuned to 'Mother Nature', and indeed deeply musical to start with, and reasonably clear of tendencies to dwell on expression of emotions in music or indeed any art form, so that one can allow a more universal and elemental type of emotional involvement to capture and engage the listener.

I'm just a little sorry that all this came too late for me to share my work with Iannis, because I now recognise that he was a real 'kindred spirit' on a much deeper level than just the artistic — for, as far as I can make out, he too was a no-soul person with 'sniff-it-out' specialist configuration.

• Kraanerg

  This was the work that demonstrated to me dramatically that in the right composer's hands even seriously 'modernistic' musical idioms based on seemingly really outlandish concepts, can be beautiful and gripping — and indeed in their own way, immensely emotionally moving.

  I discovered this work in about 1969–70 through hearing something very strange when I was using my radio on Long Wave to find interesting unfamiliar music on the odd foreign station. On this occasion what I heard 'pushed buttons' for me, as it was clearly strongly 'modernistic' in style and with a tumultuous seemingly chaotic character, with orchestral sounds but many of them sounding processed and with added reverb and boominess. The overall effect for me was of some great but frightening cosmic vision, as though one had a supra-grandstand view of the whole Universe and all its processes.

  I felt embarrassed listening to such rubbish, and grabbed the tuning knob to search for something else — but my hand refused to turn that knob, and I progressively came to acknowledge that I was spellbound, even if this wasn't 'proper' music. In the final announcement, in a foreign language, I missed the work's name, but heard 'Xenakis' — the very composer who, from my reading around, I'd regarded as one of the very worst of modernistic composers, because reputedly he used a computer and complex mathematical processes in composing his works! Totally beyond the pale!

  That started me off exploring imported records of Xenakis works, in the hope of eventually coming across that one of which I'd heard part on the radio. I was amazed to find that a fair number of those early works of his were beautiful and inspired in their own strange ways, and eventually did land myself with Kraanerg. — And sure, my first impression on the radio was vindicated, for it really is a spellbinding work, at least for those with sufficient awareness and mental flexibility.

  I identified so strongly with the visionary essence of this work (Xenakis had very much in mind the human population explosion and all its ramifications and implications when composing it) that I created a longish and similarly intensely turbulent and urgent poem based on my visionary impression of Kraanerg. I called it Spectator, and it's number 18 in The Horizon Watcher, the book of my collected poetry. As it's one of my earlier poems, it has a certain ungainly rough-edgedness that doesn't match the masterful flow of Kraanerg, but its drive carries one rapidly forward to a final anguished twist that I'm not sure would have been in Xenakis' mind when he was composing that work!

• Bohor

  An amazing, intriguing immersive 'din'! To me it's spellbinding, with a rugged beauty and grandeur, while to others it's repellent and insufferable. But, before you listen, it's important for your playback volume to be set at a modest level. This version starts relatively quietly, in a manner slightly reminiscent of a birds' dawn chorus beginning, but the tumult gradually builds up and can be hard on the ears if you don't heed this caution and allow the opening to be fairly quiet!

• Orient-Occident

  I adapted (simplified) an idea from a passage in this early electroacoustic work and used it in a section late in the 4th movement of my big organ work The Great Wilderness. Actually all I'd kept of it was a quiet half-diminished seventh chord, which fades in, holds, stops, then fades in again. In Orient-Occident the chord is more complex and apparently with some inner changes, but overall the half-diminished seventh is still the most noticeable, and there's what sounds like a repeated moderately high string pizzicato above that chord.

  In fact that passage in Orient-Occident is itself taken from a passage in Pithoprakta (see below) in which there's a held dense chord of fairly high strings with a xylophone doing the repeated high percussive notes. For use in Orient-Occident, that extracted clip had then been reduced in speed and thus pitch, and processed to give it more 'atmosphere'.

• Metastaseis
  

  One of Xenakis' earliest public works, and unlike any other music I've heard — though some coloristic effects are quintessential Xenakis. An intricate opening fan of string glissandi progressively bring about a sense of forward motion and directionality out of the initial 'stasis' of a very quiet held note. Then follows a set of variations on a dodecaphonic melodic idea, which starts out gently in a narrow pitch and dynamic range in the strings — each successive variation becoming more extreme in those parameters, till it seems that the whole orchestra will surely explode into pieces — but saved by the third section, where a fan of string glissandi now retrench towards and into the single, unison, note, this time strongly emphasized.

  The melodic idea itself, being (or at least sounding) dodecaphonic, didn't sound interesting to me in itself, but it was the progressive transformations of it that really did grab me; I felt a great joi de vivre in the whole experience.

  Read in the notes on the work accompanying the video, how much deep and clear thought and elemental aesthetic sense had gone into the creation of this unique work.

• Persepolis

• Pithoprakta

• Terretektorh

  (Recording is at a rather high level — please turn volume down before playing this; the opening should be very quiet, or the louder parts will be too loud, and hard on the ears.)

  For large and augmented orchestra, all members being soloists, with a wide range of additional percussion instruments and whistles played at times by the regular orchestra instrumentalists — and the players are supposed to be dispersed throughout the audience, though this is a studio performance. Ideally therefore you'd be hearing this in surround-sound, with the various sounds moving around and interacting all around you.

  To me, this is a compelling, bewitching ritualistic nature poem, surely with an abundance of joyful humour. — But here the 'nature' is on the largest, cosmic scale as well as incorporating suggestions of the weather and wildlife immediately around us. But for the immense logistical requirements of a performance, surely this work cries out to be a concert repertoire 'regular'!

• Nomos Gamma

  Another work for large orchestra (all soloists), with hugely augmented drum section, the lot dispersed throughout the audience. Much darker and more concertedly 'cosmic' in conception than Terretektorh. To me, absolutely thrilling, and the final section is awesomely hair-raising in its fiery intensity. Again surround-sound listening would be ideal, but at least the widest-possible stereo spread is called for in order to get some idea of the spatial deployment and interactions of the various sounds.

  Weirdly but meaningfully, in December 2022 I had the pleasure and privilege to listen (with high-grade headphones) to an absolutely jaw-dropping recording of the volcano Mount Yasur erupting, allegedly from the crater edge, and for me that vividly brought to mind Nomos Gamma, albeit the volcano sound being like Nomos Gamma on hypersteroids!

• Polytope de Montreal

  A truly 'gobsmacking' experience — another 'total immersion' piece like the two above works, rather reminiscent of Terretektorh, but shorter, more concentrated and pungent — a bit hard on the ears at times with all the shrill woodwind, but thrilling even without the light-show that I understand accompanied its first performance. Indeed, I'm sure I'd have found even a Xenakis-directed light-show to be tiresomely distracting from this brilliant and complex music — generally not getting on with visuals accompanying music, except perhaps for staged productions of operas, ballets or other music dramas.

• Anaktoria

• Jonchaies

… At that time I could find only one recording of the work, on a record including various other short Zieleńsky works. Unfortunately the performances, especially the Magnificat, were marred by often singing flat, and by poor ensemble, and a rather slow tempo for the Magnificat.

However, a YouTube search just now turned up several pretty good recordings of the latter, though none fully matches the effect of the performance I heard on the radio, because the latter used a large choir, sufficiently well-trained to have precise ensemble for the intricacies still to show up and have impact, while the recordings I found on YT all appear to be using small choirs.

• Magnificat , for 3 choirs (12 voice parts — SATT+ATTB+TTBB) (and instruments)
  

  This is an intensely beautiful and 'felt' short work, with a lot of antiphonal interplay between the three choir groups. This is one of a number of 'early' works, including ones by Tallis and Giovanni Gabrieli, whose antiphonal effects would presumably have predisposed me towards antiphony in my own works, especially the choral ones.

• In Monte Oliveti (motet)