Born in Liverpool in 1957, Andrew Ford studied at Lancaster University
with Edward Cowie and John Buller, and after graduating, in 1978,
he was appointed Fellow in Music at the University of Bradford.
Moving to Australia in 1983 he joined the Faculty of Creative
Arts at the University of Wollongong. He was composer in residence
with the Australian Chamber Orchestra between 1992 and 1994, and
after retiring from the halls of academe in 1995 he has presented
The Music Show on ABC Radio National every Saturday morning. His
catalogue is large and varied, covering all genres from opera
to a cappella choral works.
With a libretto by Margaret Morgan, Night and dreams: the Death
of Sigmund Freud was written for Music Theatre Sydney, and
for the voice of Gerald English. Ford told Morgan that "Apart
from anything else, Gerald looks like Freud." Later, Morgan
wrote, “It wasn't until Gerald had some publicity shots taken,
with beard, glasses and a Freudian cigar, that I realised just
how uncannily true that was. The logic of the choice of subject
soon made itself clear to me: two men profoundly important to
their fields, in the centre of the maelstrom of, respectively,
social and musical change.”
Night
and Dreams explores the end of Freud’s life, in London in September 1939. Whilst
listening to 78 rpm discs of Schubert and radio reports of the
Nazis in his homeland, he dreams (this is Freud, remember) of
an unidentified naked girl and contemplates his death. All this
is reported to his own psychoanalyst – we, the audience. It’s not an easy listen by any means.
The piece is very static, Freud musing, sometimes singing, but
a lot of the time addressing us. There is little in the music
to grab hold of – there’s only three instruments, a piano and
two harps, with pre-recorded sounds, but not concrète
sounds, this “backing track” consists of recordings of marching
Stormtroopers, Neville Chamberlain
announcing war with Germany and so on – but yet it’s strangely compelling, gripping even; the libretto carrying
everything forward and Ford’s minimal musical intervention,
which seems to be some kind of dream-like experience, is always
interesting and pertinent.
It’s a very disturbing experience, and there’s no respite from the
fantastic wanderings of Freud’s mind. We’re caught in his reverie,
locked in a room with a man, failing at every turn, and seeming
to ramble incoherently. The work ends with a 78 rpm disc of
Des Baches Wiegenlied from Die Schöne Müllerin
and the final sound we hear is the repeating grove of the record.
Ewig, ewig?
This is so unlike anything I have heard by Ford that it came as quite
a shock to me. Did I enjoy it? That’s an hard question to answer.
Certainly I admire the work as a composition, its form and character,
but like it, in the way I like Ford’s Sad Jigs (12005)
for string orchestra, A Reel, a Fling and a Ghostly Galliard
(String Quartet No.2) (2006), Headlong (2006),
for orchestra, or The Unquiet Grave (1997/1998), a concerto
for viola and ensemble? No I don’t, and in reality I can’t for
it is such a demanding work that without the visual aspect to
the piece I feel that I’m missing a lot of the experience of
performance. However, I must say that it is an impressive and
very important work and with study – not difficult for it doesn’t
feel as if you’ve given an hour of your time to the piece –
it will become less complicated and more easily accepted. I
have to write that anything by Andrew Ford is well worth hearing
so please do not be put off by the fact that this is no easy
summer afternoon listen, give yourself some time and you’ll
get into the music and the drama. It’s good to have this important
work available on CD so that we can spend time with it.
Usually I moan when the main work on a disk is followed by a shorter
piece as a filler, and under normal circumstances the Ode
to Napoleon is a work which would make me run for the great
outdoors and the sounds of nature, but after Ford’s tortured
monodrama Schoenberg’s seems like a walk in the park; untroubled
and pleasant. The difficulties of this late 12 note work, which
utilizes sprechgesang (sung speech) but freer than before
– English simply recites the words, but in a dramatic way –
seems much easier than it once did. The accompanying piano quintet
plays quite expressionistic music, as you’d expect, but this
isn’t as complicated as some of this composer’s works – the
Violin Concerto or Variations for Orchestra, for
instance.
Anyone with an interest in the music of our time will welcome this
disk, as I do, and it is well worth the small investment. The
recordings are very good and you would never realise, from the
sound, that the two works were recorded 27 years apart, except
for the fact that English does sound very young in the Schoenberg.
Excellent, and very compelling, performances, with good notes
in the booklet by Ford himself.
Bob Briggs
Gerald English (tenor/narrator), Ingrid Rahl
