First-night nerves
Peter Phillips
However, that has been happening of late. A number of British contemporary designers, influenced by the New Naturalism movement, are using plants to create something resembling ‘natural’ plant communities. Moreover, influential garden owners are experimenting with the use of foreign vegetation types, particularly those of the Californian coastal strip and the Chaparral, as well as the Midwest American prairie, the Mediterranean maquis and garrigue, South African winter rainfall areas, even arid areas and desert. Parts of gardens, planted to resemble these habitats, can be seen in a number of gardens presently open to the public.
There is both a Cretan garden and an African one at the Garden House, Buckland Monachorum in Devon, developed by Keith Wiley before he left to run his ‘Wildside Plants ’ nursery in 2003. The late Christopher Lloyd, influenced by the experimental work on prairie plantings done by Dr James Hitchmough of Sheffield University, brought back seed from Minnesota for his last garden project, an American-style prairie at Great Dixter in West Sussex. At the Old Vicarage, East Ruston, quite close to the sea in Norfolk, Alan Gray and Graham Robeson have made not only a Mediterranean garden and a South African one but also, fascinatingly, a ‘desert wash’, designed to mimic the Arizonan desert after twice-yearly heavy rainfall, using some of the plants which can survive in that harsh environment. And at Elmstead Market, in Essex, Beth Chatto has made a highly successful Mediterranean gravel garden out of the erstwhile nursery car park.
Some may argue that these are classy pastiches, and that these gardeners might have been better employed perfecting ‘the English garden look’, since it is suited to our climate, and usually successful. To do so, however, is to ignore the fact that this climate is changing, and summer drought in the south and east of England is now the spectre at the feast. Much of this experimentation with foreign plant communities is simply a considered, informed response to that. If it is possible, as Beth Chatto has shown us that it is, to grow a mixture of southern European, Californian and South African plants, in a self-sustaining, selfperpetuating community, with no watering after the plants have become established, why, gardeners in the south-east would be bonkers not even to consider following suit.
What is more, these attempts at developing plant communities, as they might be seen in landscapes abroad, seem to me a homage paid by British gardeners to the variety and quality of other countries’ native flora. Indeed, you might say that British gardens have always paid that homage. Once it was the Middle East, the Himalayas and China, now it is California, the Midwest and Australia. Perhaps we are not so parochial after all? The life of a composer is an attractive one. He is not personally responsible for the ensemble which will perform his music, yet all the rehearsal time is made over to his requirements. In the performance all he has to do is sit and listen, and then upstage everybody at the end when he takes his bow. As a very inexperienced composer, I am on full alert to the niceties of my current situation, receiving a première at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
The forum for this is a series called Works and Process, masterminded by Mary Sharp Cronson. She takes astonishing risks. The bulk of the concert I have been contributing to is made up of contemporary ballet, with music so extreme that it was found necessary to invite a specialist group from Paris — the Ensemble Alternance — to play it. Amplified polystyrene blocks scratched against themselves are part of the sound-world in question. The dancers are from New Yorkbased ballet schools. It has turned out that 15-minute ballets, even if intensely contemporary, are popular. The 300-seat theatre in the basement of the Guggenheim has sold out two nights running, and I am really, really sure that has nothing to do with me. But here again my position was not unenviable. It was clearly hoped that I would provide some contrast both to the dancing and the prevailing musical aesthetic, yet the audience was not in the first instance there to hear what I had to say. I could take risks of my own. Out of deference to the French musicians present, and indeed the host of Parisbased sponsors of the event, I set four rondeaux by Charles d’Orleans. These I scored for contralto, guitar and two trumpets; and although, through lack of familiarity, I am inclined to chronicle every aspect of what I am doing, I can report that in the act of composition there is scope for a small (in my case, no doubt very small) miracle to take place. Sounds and ideas do seem to come from nowhere, uncontrived. On hearing the results months later, I could not remember ever having consciously thought those notes. This is quite the opposite of performing someone else’s music, where in a sense everything is contrived, every step calculated in order to give a true performance. In composing there is no truth outside oneself and one’s instincts.
More intriguingly, no matter how unfamiliar those notes may be, months later, in the first performance, the relationship one has formed with them is indelible. One cares for them as for a vulnerable child, feeling responsibility, hoping they will be strong enough to stand up for themselves, aware of possible weaknesses, willing them on even though one has lost control of them. When they finally announce themselves to a host of strangers, one feels that they have indeed left home.
Given that all I had to do on the night was take a bow, was it reasonable to be so nervous? The performers were nervous, as I am when conducting, because they feared they might make mistakes and let us all down. They were, after all, making the sound and I had set them a difficult task. They had very specific responsibilities, which their training as players and singers was designed to qualify them to meet. They were worried that this training might prove insufficient to the task in hand, which, if found wanting, might mean they would not be asked again. But the modern composer (as opposed to the hired servant of the past) is really outside any system of training or even of recognised technique, and the very insufficiency of the context for what he does, paradoxically perhaps, can be troubling. All I was asked for was ten minutes of music, paid effectively by the minute. There were no other pointers.
And afterwards? Afterwards, the phrases run in one’s head like they never did at the time of composition; afterwards, one tries to gauge whether one’s offspring has lived up to what was hoped for it, reading between the lines of the welter of polite comments that inevitably follow a première as everyone busily convinces themselves that they’ve had a good evening out. The most heartfelt remark I heard was muttered without a glimmer of a smile by an elderly lady as she passed me to leave the museum, pulling her fur coat about her: ‘Quite the best thing on the programme.’ I reckon she was glad I had gone lightly on the polystyrene blocks.
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