Beyond the baton
Peter Phillips
When I am asked what I do, I say I am a musician. The response is invariably, ‘Which instrument do you play?’ When I say I conduct, I am aware that I have passed beyond the easy into the more difficult, but I know at the same moment that I have not lost my audience. They know that instrumentalists need conductors and everyone has seen them, it is just that such figures of authority are rather austere and hard to talk to. But should I be asked what I conduct, and should I say, ‘Singers,’ then I have surely blown it. ‘Musicians’ are not associated with singers and above all not with music which consists only of singing.
I tell this tale because I have been struck recently, as I was when I read music at Oxford, by how unquantifiable the profession of ‘musician’ actually is. To the superficial glance music is one simple thing, involving instruments and orchestras; to the insider it is so many things that univer sities hardly know how to create a syllabus for it, and would-be employers do not know what to expect from someone presenting themselves under that title. As an undergraduate I used to envy my contemporaries in the history faculty, because all they had to do, it seemed to me, was the same thing, on slightly shifting topics, ten times over, i.e., write an essay. In the music faculty we had to write history essays, certainly, but they were only three of the ten papers. We had also to imitate the idioms of composers from the past (three more papers); read a complete orchestral score on to the keyboard; compose an original piece of music; write a mini-thesis based on original research; and give a recital on an instrument of our choice. The person who got a first in this subject was either capable of maintaining a good average across the board (and probably could solve the Times crossword in five minutes) or was a martian. Anyway, to this day there are few firsts in music.
I was recently interviewed for the post of director of music at Trinity College, Cambridge, in succession to Richard Marlow, who has been there for 38 years. Eventually, the job was given to Stephen ‘Sid’ Layton. It would be demeaning for me to comment further, but in the end the problem for the assessors remained the same: what could reasonably be asked for under the title of musician?
Thirty-eight years ago, it was more straightforward: Dr Marlow was first and foremost an organist who could train a choir and teach in the faculty, as Dr Stanford had been before him. More recent experience has suggested that organists are not necessarily good choirtrainers, or not good enough in the cutand-thrust recording world of today, and may not be good teachers. The profession has become more specialised, with the profile of those who are outstanding in each category correspondingly higher, but it remains the case that a musician is expected to wear several hats; the question these days is the pecking-order of the hats.
So there were hard questions about recording and touring and choral repertoire, alongside harder questions about the disciplines one was qualified to teach, the place one has reserved for music in worship, one’s capacity to encourage keyboard specialists when one has no keyboard skills oneself, and how one intends to revive the fortunes of the music society, which will mean conducting amateur orchestras. To satisfy the examiners, one needs to appear immensely solid in every department; to satisfy the students, one needs solidity tempered with charisma and, if possible, fame.
I wonder if there is another job on earth which has so many requirements and so few guidelines. I suspect that each college trying to find a director of music will come up with a different mix of all these ingredi ents, which no doubt will give rise to considerable disagreement as academics, priests and administrators visit on the candidates their view of what their college should be. Yet the requirements are not unreasonable, since they all come under the title of musician. If I ever thought that simply waving my arms about in the hope of sparking a memorable interpretation of a masterpiece was enough to qualify me for a job in music I realise now that I was being simplistic. I should have remembered that final exam at Oxford. And have undertaken some space travel.
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