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LENNOX BERKELEY was born in Oxford on 12 May 1908. He was educated at Gresham’s School, Holt, St. George’s School, Harpenden, and Merton College, Oxford, where he studied languages. From 1927 to 1988 he lived in Paris and worked for some time as a student of Nadia Boulanger. During these years he met several French composers, including Ravel, Poulenc, Milhaud and Honegger. In the mid-1980s he returned to England. He has taught composition at the Royal Academy of Music for almost thirty years.

     Berkeley’s compositions include many songs and choral works, as well as the Stabat Mater (1946), Four Songs of St. Teresa of Avila (1947), and the Magnificat (1968) — all for voices and orchestra. Nelson, his only full-length opera, was written in 1958, and he has composed three one-act operas, A Dinner Engagement, Ruth, and The Castaway. His instrumental works include three symphonies, several concertos, and numerous pieces for orchestra, chamber groups and solo instruments.

We began by asking him about his early musical experiences.

Berkeley: My first real awareness of music as a child came through my father. He wasn’t a musician, though he was passionately fond of music. He joined the navy when he was thirteen years old, so he had never had the time to learn an instrument, but when he retired from the navy he used to spend time playing a pianola — you know, one of those things which you peddle? This was before the days of the gramophone, really. He had a lot of classical music on rolls for this pianola, and he played them a great deal. I got to hear music in that way for the first time and this certainly woke something in me. I didn’t go to concerts very much when I was a child. It was only when I went to Oxford as an undergraduate that I began to take an interest in live music.

You don’t think that your school had a strong influence on you, musically?

Berkeley: Well, I went away to school, and I used to hear music there, but I cannot recall any of it.

Did you write music at school?

Berkeley: Not really. Again, I think it was at Oxford that I began to compose, without knowing quite what I was doing, or how to set about it. I did write music there, especially songs, but even then I hadn’t learnt anything about how to write music; that came later.

Do you remember any of those early works?

Berkeley: Not much. I do recall that I set one or two French poems, and I remember that one of the first English poems which I set was by Auden whom I knew well at Oxford. He was a bit younger than me, and I think my last year there was his first. The song was performed at a sort of private concert by Cecil Day Lewis who had a very nice light baritone voice. That was another lifelong friendship that started at Oxford.

Do you remember which Auden poem it was?

Berkeley: No. I think it was one of his very early poems which has never been published.

It was at Oxford, then, that you decided you wanted to be a musician?

Berkeley: Yes. I knew Dr. Ley, who was then organist of Christ Church, and later became responsible for music at Eton. He used to let me go up in the organ loft at Christ Church. I heard him play a lot of Bach, and this was one of my earliest experience of live music — apart from the pianola. After that I used to go to all the chamber music concerts in the Holywell music room at Oxford during those years.

Music was obsessive even then?

Berkeley: So much so that I didn’t really attend to what I was supposed to be learning. It was during this time that I realised music was what I really had to do.

Did you come into contact with much modern music at Oxford?

Berkeley: Yes, a little, though much of it wouldn’t be thought of as modern now. I remember the Debussy and Ravel quartets at the Holywell music room; I was particularly attracted by French music, which was one of the things that made me decide to go to Paris to study afterwards.

How did that come about?

Berkeley: Well, about the time I went down from Oxford I had an introduction to Ravel whom I met in London. He was very kind to me. He looked at all my earliest efforts and it was he who suggested that I should go to Nadia Boulanger, which is what I did. She looked at some of those early things and she said she would take me as a pupil. So off I went to Paris; it was 1926 or 1927. I remember her telling me that she thought I needed a thorough technical training. During the first year she made me do nothing but exercises in strict counterpoint and fugue, and she didn’t want to look at any original work because she felt so strongly that I needed this thorough grounding.

Did you feel this need yourself?

Berkeley: I realised that I lacked something. I must say that it was a difficult time because it’s a very severe discipline to do nothing but that for a year. But I think it was as a result of her strictness about this that I acquired whatever technique I may have.

As a teacher she didn’t impose a style on you?

Berkeley: No, she was very good about that. Yet, she has, you know, the enormously strong personality that everybody says she has, and this made me work in a way that I can’t imagine anybody else making me do. It was impossible to bring to her anything that one hadn’t sweated over.

You worked very long hours?

Berkeley: I found them long, yes. Of course, as well as Nadia herself, the French are very strict about matters of discipline, technique, and so on. I think now that although it was somewhat painful at the time it was a tremendous asset to have this rather severe training.

Do you feel that the French were strict to excess, even after their studentship period?

Berkeley: I think that they do tend to be so. Certainly they were at that time. For instance, with executants, with young pianists and violinists, they make them learn the whole of music, including counterpoint and so on, as well as the techniques of performance.

Did this apply to those French composers you had most admired?

Berkeley: To nearly all of them, yes. They’d all been through the same strict training. A composer like Debussy would never have been able to compose within an idiom that was then completely new and strange, and to do it so successfully, if he hadn’t had this technical background, the sort of training which won him the Prix de Rome as a young man.

Are you saying that musical innovation, then, really means a close relationship with tradition?

Berkeley: Yes. I think that innovation can be made to work if it is rooted in tradition, though I’m not saying that all innovators need the same tradition.

But don’t you think that excessive training in any given tradition could restrict a composer’s scope? Take a French composer you admire, Poulenc, for example . . .

Berkeley: I don’t think Poulenc ever went through the strictest academic teaching, and, of course, it’s perfectly true that so much of his music is instinctive, isn’t it? I love a lot of his music, particularly the songs, which I think are his best things. There is an element of hit or miss, however, in some of his work, depending on whether he was really on his best form or not when he wrote it. But that sounds like a judgement on another composer, which is something I don’t like to make.

What would you say were the major influences on you of this French experience, apart from the disciplined training we’ve been talking about?

Berkeley: I think hearing a lot of music by the established composers of that time, including some Russians, such as Prokoviev and Stravinsky; they’d been through a different kind of academic training, of course, though it was still a fairly strict discipline.

Does any of the music which you wrote at that time still survive?

Berkeley: There are one or two songs which I wrote early on that I still like. But though I wrote a good deal of music I’ve scrapped most of it. The first things that I own to, so to speak, weren’t written until the late 1930s.

After you had returned to this country?

Berkeley: Yes. The whole period in France was a sort of formative period.

Were you developing a conscious theory as a composer?

Berkeley: Not really. I think everything I did was part of a natural eclecticism, moving towards what I wanted to do myself.

When did you return to England?

Berkeley: I didn’t come back permanently until 1936.

What did you think about the English musical scene at that time?

Berkeley: I found it more restricted, more limited to fewer composers than I’d known in France.

Who were the dominant English figures then?

Berkeley: Well, Vaughan Williams, William Walton, and Constant Lambert, I suppose. Lambert didn’t leave as much as one would have hoped, but he was a remarkable musician. The early works of Arnold Bax and Arthur Bliss were being played. There were some interesting things, certainly.

Was it difficult for you to move into this sort of scene?

Berkeley: I didn’t really try to. Not because I didn’t think it any good — because obviously there was a lot of talent here — but I think I didn’t find any composer in England with whom I had any real affinity.

Until you met Benjamin Britten?

Berkeley: That’s right. He was the first English composer with whom I felt any special affinity. I met him at the end of the 1980s and I saw a good deal of him when I came back to England. He’s ten years younger than I am, but he’s had a big influence on me and on my work.

You wrote the Mont Juic suite together. Was that in any sense a political response to Spain in the 1930s?

Berkeley: I met Britten first in Barcelona, in fact, at an international music festival where we both had something performed. We heard some Catalan tunes and Ben jotted them down on odd scraps of paper. We wrote the dance suite when we got home, but I don’t think it had any direct political bearing. Mont Juic was the name of the park in Barcelona where we heard the tunes. We heard later that it was also the name of the prison in Barcelona.

If not in Mont Juic, did the political issues of the 1930s have no relevance to music?

Berkeley: I think they did. Ben felt very strongly about the Spanish War, though any influence on his music and mine was indirect, I believe. I do think that events or political attitudes can produce feelings that might cause one to write music.

Like Britten’s War Requiem?

Berkeley: Yes, that’s a good example of what I mean. I think Britten has been affected very much in this way — more than I have, certainly. Some composers and artists in other media connect their art with actual events more directly than others do.

If you set words to music, your choice of words could carry a political or moral content? The music would reflect the content of the words, wouldn’t it?

Berkeley: Yes. It’s rather difficult to show that any music was directly inspired by a particular type of influence, though it’s clear, say, that Beethoven was strongly affected by political happenings.

Some English composers, like the Marxist, Alan Bush, have claimed a political relevance for music?

Berkeley: Yes. Bush has remained faithful to his political creed, but, of course, this has manifested itself chiefly in political operas.

What about British composers who align themselves with the would-be-radicals in poetry and the other arts, composers like Cornelius Cardew? Does this kind of radicalism in the arts relate to radical politics?

Berkeley: I don’t think it follows. Radical alterations in the language of any art aren’t necessarily produced by political radicals. Some so-called ‘revolutionary’ composers, in the political sense, are very traditional musicians.

An artist who works for a popular revolutionary cause would have to work inside a very popular musical medium, wouldn’t he?

Berkeley: Not always. There’s the instance of Mozart’s Figaro which was, in a sense, a politically radical opera. Beaumarchais’ play was designed to make some fun of the aristocracy, and it’s obvious that Mozart agreed with those critical views. But it’s also true that his music didn’t appeal to the general public in his day, not so much as that of Cimarosa did, for example.

But Mozart was always able to convey the other side of any moral debate, especially in the operas?

Berkeley: Yes. He obviously sympathises with all his characters whenever they can deserve sympathy.

And he’s like Shakespeare in this, isn’t he, in his ability to sympathise at all levels, to show compassionate understanding for all sides, almost to the extent that sometimes there is no ‘other side’?

Berkeley: Yes. Which is why Mozart’s music was infinitely richer than that of his eighteenth-century contemporaries. They often produced music which was nearer to what people expected. As he grew older — though he never grew very old —Mozart’s music developed apart from this common expectancy.

When you came back to England finally, did you have a different sense of the ‘Englishness’ of music here?

Berkeley: Yes, although not all English composers belonged to it. Alan Rawsthorne didn’t attach himself to any particular English tradition, for instance.

But aren’t you talking now of a recent, rather local, English tradition, that which includes Elgar, Vaughan Williams and such composers?

Berkeley: Well, if we’re thinking of a longer tradition, going back to the Elizabethans, we have something quite different. Someone like Michael Tippett has been influenced a good deal by Elizabethan madrigal and song.

But, as a song-writer, aren’t you a part of that wider sense of Englishness?

Berkeley: Well, yes, a bit, certainly.

You talked earlier of your eclecticism. Isn’t it a curious thing about your music that your critics trace so many influences in your work, especially French ones? The 20s style of Poulenc found in the 40s style of Berkeley is supposed to demonstrate, once more, the existence of a ‘time-lag’ between the continent and here.

Berkeley: It’s difficult for me to say, because I’m not conscious of these ‘influences’. I don’t think that any of my music is very much like the 20s music of Poulenc, quite honestly. As I’ve said, I do feel more affinity with his later music, especially the songs. I don’t think this ‘time-lag’ idea is true. I don’t claim that my music is at all up-to-date, so there’s a ‘time-lag’ there, if you like, but not in the sense that I hark back to Poulenc and the 1920s.

To suggest that music has to be ‘up-to-date’ suggests that there is inevitable progress in the arts, doesn’t it? This ‘time-lag’ idea assumes the same thing?

Berkeley: The whole question of being up-to-date is a very difficult one, because if we think of the music of the past, the music of even a hundred years ago, it’s not necessarily the avant-garde composers of their day who were the best. I don’t think we consider very much the actual date when something good was written. Whether it was thirty years behind the times in the nineteenth century doesn’t really trouble one very much today, does it? In any case, I never really consider it. I think simply of writing the kind of music that’s right for me.

Do you think that twentieth-century music has tended to become too aridly intellectual?

Berkeley: Well, yes. A good deal of it has suppressed the human element, I feel. I’m not sure that the gradual disappearance of subjective feeling hasn’t been anti-musical. Music based only on mathematical calculation seems to me to be a different kind of activity, different from music, I mean.

Couldn’t this be seen as part of your eclecticism, again? That you tend to work inside music, distrusting extraneous factors, political or theoretical? And couldn’t that be construed as a sort of ‘music for music’s sake’ viewpoint?

Berkeley: I’ve never been sure quite what that means. Certainly, I regard music as an act of communication, but I don’t think about an audience very much when I’m composing. I just think of how to present the musical ideas that come to me in the best way that I can. Music is a language or medium which one explores. I don’t think the composer should be consciously delivering a message.

Were you ever influenced at all by such developments in musical language as serialism?

Berkeley: I believe that serial technique is interesting to all composers because it did provide a different way of musical construction. It can be used in ways different from those intended by Schoenberg and his followers sixty years ago. If I’ve understood this rightly, his object was to abolish tonality which had ‘had its day’. But I don’t think anybody since the 1950s, when the serial system came into common use, has used it so very strictly. It’s now employed in a tonal manner, recognising the wider scope of the whole chromatic scale, but employing tonal centres in way that would have been anathema to the early dodecaphonic composers. In the end, I believe, tonality is something you can’t get away from entirely.

Why do you think this is?

Berkeley: Because the harmonic series seems both to be a mathematical truth and also to have emotional relationships within it for human beings. It’s something nobody’s ever satisfactorily explained.

When did you first become a teacher?

Berkeley: Immediately after the war. The Royal Academy of Music appointed a few composers with the idea of helping young composers. They thought that it would be a good thing to help pupils with actual composition rather than with technical learning of harmony and so on.

Did the example of Nadia Boulanger’s teaching serve as a model for you?

Berkeley: More or less. In her attitude to composition she was very good indeed. She encouraged the right things — individuality and boldness — and she showed great insight into our musical intentions, you know.

Can we return to your own compositions? You have rarely gone in for very large-scale works. Even your symphonies have gradually become shorter, and Nelson was the only large-scale opera, in 1954. Is this apparent preference for the small-scale composition just a personal thing, or do you believe that large-scale works of art are not possible now?

Berkeley: It does seem to be the case that in poetry the large-scale work has gone out, doesn’t it; nobody writes epics nowadays? But I’m not sure about painting. There are certainly some large canvases, though that’s only physical largeness, which isn’t the same thing at all. No, I choose to work in small-scale because I prefer to do so. I’ve always liked song and other short forms. Not that I would mind trying to write another full-length opera. I’ve had more experience of the stage since I wrote Nelson. I feel that I learnt something from the three one-act operas, and I’d be better equipped to do a full-length opera now. But it would take such an immense time.

You’ve written some longer choral pieces for the Roman Catholic Church?

Berkeley: Yes, I’ve done two masses, but they’re liturgical masses rather than concert masses. One’s an ordinary four-part work with organ, and I also wrote a five-part unaccompanied mass.

Do you think there’s such a thing as a distinctly religious style in your work?

Berkeley: Not really, though it does depend on whether I’m writing for a liturgical purpose — the work to be performed in church — or for a concert platform. I think in writing liturgical music perhaps one does modify one’s style a bit, a more contemplative, less extrovert approach, maybe.

You feel less need to express your own subjective feelings in liturgical music?

Berkeley: Yes, exactly. And I think to that extent I have rather modified the things I’ve done for church performance. But I’ve also done things on religious words that are designed for the concert occasion, like the St. Theresa songs, and one or two other things.

What is the relationship between words and music; doesn’t something disappear in a poem set to music?

Berkeley: I’ve thought about this a lot, because I like setting words, and I do feel that when a composer sets a poem he has in a way to destroy one side of that poem in order to re-create it in another form. I think that this is legitimate if he is able to reproduce the atmosphere of the poem very strongly, so that the poem is, as it were, rewritten in another language, translated, re-made.

Doesn’t this mean that the greatest poetry is more difficult to set to music?

Berkeley: Oh, exactly, because I think one hesitates much more to interfere with it. I know that some of the Schubert songs were by Goethe, weren’t they, but some of his most beautiful songs are to words which, though certainly not trivial, were not great poetry?

How do you get musical ideas? Do they come simply as music, or in some other way?

Berkeley: I generally find that musical ideas only really come to me when I am working on music, when I’m sitting there thinking about an actual piece. It isn’t so much having ideas, because if you’re a composer you must have ideas, otherwise you couldn’t create at all. But it’s having the right idea at the right moment that’s so difficult, the feeling that you must go on with that particular piece. Very often one knows in theory, so to speak, what the idea must be, only the right notes to express it just won’t come. That’s really what I mean by the right idea, finding the right notes for that particular moment.

Has your work ever been influenced by contemporary popular music?

Berkeley: ‘Pop’ in the usual sense seems to me a very threadbare form of music. The harmony’s abysmal, mostly, and melodically it has very little to offer either. I think perhaps the Beatles have been the only ones who had some genuine talent of a musical kind. I’ve been interested in jazz, which seems to me something much more important. A good many of the developments in contemporary music have been related to jazz — the improvisatory side of it, for instance, and jazz sometimes has quite interesting rhythms and harmonies too.

How far do you approve of aleatory music?

Berkeley: Well, it varies a good deal. Lutoslawski uses aleatory methods within fairly strictly controlled limits, and I think they sometimes work. But he’s a very fine composer, in any case. I must confess that I’m old-fashioned enough to prefer his earlier, more traditional pieces which were marvellously constructed.

What about extreme examples, like Cage’s ‘4’33”’?

Berkeley: Quite honestly, it doesn’t mean anything at all to me.

Do you think that English culture has really missed out on the sort of explosion in the arts which occurred on the continent around the time of World War 1? It’s been said of your music, hasn’t it, and it’s said quite often nowadays of our art in general, that we’ve failed to develop new art in radical ways?

Berkeley: Yes, I’ve heard all that. But I think we’ve got as good, if not better, composers in this country as in any other, really. No, I won’t say better, because that sounds very chauvinistic, but they’re certainly as good, I honestly think.

Is there a distinctive English quality in English music. Aren’t ‘modesty’ and a distrust of grandiloquence qualities common to English composition even in modern times?

Berkeley: I suppose that’s true. There’s a distinctive sort of English nostalgia which you find in Vaughan Williams sometimes, and in Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro, that’s quite unique. But I’d have thought that French composers such as Ravel and Fauré had the quality of modesty, though it was combined with a particular kind of French charm.

Finally, what are you working on now?

Berkeley: I’m doing another piece for string orchestra, commissioned by the Arts Council for the Westminster Cathedral String Orchestra which is conducted by Clin Mawby. And I’m trying to do a work for chamber orchestra and guitar which Julian Bream has asked me to do. This is a difficult combination, because the volume of sound from the guitar is so tiny compared with even a chamber orchestra.

You’ve written for guitar before?

Berkeley: Yes. I’ve a Sonatina which was written for Julian too, and he’s played that a great number of times. Also a set of variations for guitar. But there’s little music for guitar with orchestra. And, yes, Peter Pears has asked me to write some new songs with harp accompaniment for him and Ossian Ellis.

Are there some modern poets you admire and would like to try to set to music?

Berkeley: Well, I admire many modern poets, Dylan Thomas, for example, though I like him for the sound of the words rather than the meaning about which I’m not always very clear. I’ve set poems by e. e. cummings, who is very individual but very difficult. Everybody seems to be setting him nowadays, don’t they? Auden, of course. But I’ve not found any really contemporary poets I’d like to set. Perhaps I don’t know them well enough yet.