Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
These were very controversial at the time. They were conversations between Stravinsky and his, if you like, musical secretary, Robert Craft – an American conductor and musicologist who became his sort of right hand; some would say his evil genius. In the conversation books you get the feeling that when Stravinsky arrived in Hollywood, he was the centre of the world.
Conversations with Igor Stravinsky?
These were very controversial at the time. They were conversations between Stravinsky and his, if you like, musical secretary, Robert Craft: an American conductor and musicologist who became his sort of right hand – some would say his evil genius. Stravinsky had been exiled from Russia, exiled from France by the First World War and then again by the Occupation, and he arrived in America in 1945 and settled in Hollywood. Because he was rather stuck up and spoilt and grand, Stravinsky refused to teach at a university in America. The thing about teaching is it keeps you in touch with what’s happening. Stravinsky wasn’t. And so, when this young guy, Craft, turned up as a fan, he took him on as an amanuensis. Craft became an adopted son almost, and eventually a sort of Svengali.
In the conversation books you get the feeling that when Stravinsky arrived in Hollywood, he was the centre of the world. Here was this incredibly cultivated man – a survivor, almost a dinosaur, who had lived through the Revolution, spoke old pre-revolutionary Russian, saw Tchaikovsky as a child, knew Rimsky-Korsakov, worked with Diaghilev and all that. Craft’s book – and Craft is the sort of person who will never use three words if he can use 47 – gives you a feeling of this great man decreeing, issuing his opinions. But in actual fact, when Stravinsky arrived in Hollywood he was extremely washed up, in a difficult state musically, and nowhere near the centre of action. The truth was very different, and he was actually searching to reinvent himself.
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Giles Swayne is a British composer, best known for his monumental choral pieces and his interest in African musical culture. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music under Harrison Birtwistle and at the Paris Conservatoire with Olivier Messiaen. In 1980 his choral work Cry, for 28 amplified voices, was premiered by the BBC Singers under John Poole. Hailed as a landmark, it has since been performed twice at the Proms and many times worldwide. In 1981, Swayne visited Senegal to record the music of the Jola people of Casamance. These recordings are now in the British Library. From 1990 to 1996 he lived in the Akuapem Hills in eastern Ghana. He now lives in London and is Composer-in-residence at Clare College, Cambridge. He is currently working on an open-ended series of bagatelles for piano, and a choral setting of a poem. ‘The thing about music, like the arts, is that there’s an extraordinary dichotomy between the art and the career,’ he says. ‘You can have people who are really extremely mediocre with huge careers, and you can have people who are wonderfully good, who explore their art in great depth, and actually don’t have wonderful careers. Bach was one of those.’
