Are You a Composer?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 928, 24 May 1957, Page 26

Are You a Composer?

| The case of Anthony Elton, {

by

D. W.

McKENZIE

"ARE you a composer?" "Well, actually, I’m a school-teacher, but I do a bit of composing in my spare time." If you talk like this to Anthony Elton Williams you'll hear an outburst that sounds more like Taranaki than his native Essex. "If a man’s a‘ composer," he says, "he’s that first, last and always. For his bread and butter he may sweep the streets or he may whack children, but he says to himself all the time, ‘I’m a composer-that’s all I live for.’ " This young man, who writes under the name of Anthony Elton, knew when he was nine that he was a composer. He was then a chorister with a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, attending the Magdalen College School under the eye of an organist who encouraged his composition. All true New Zealanders will look with envy on his record here, because he retired on a pension at the age of 1412! He couldn’t stay at the school, however, in spite of the pension, but had to go to an unhappy school experience at Bournemouth, whose most important fruit was his first published composition, the partsong "Come Away, Death," which he: wrote when he was 16. He went on to the Royal Academy of Music, where he worked at piano and clarinet, and let his mind seethe with musical ideas until in 1953 he won an Academy Composition Scholarship with an overture for orchestra and a song cycle for tenor. "My professor suggested I should write something for clarinet because I played it," Anthony Elton says, "but I didn’t fancy clarinet and piano, and I didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of two clarinets alone, until one day in a Lyons cafeteria over tea and a bun, in that strange way the mind works, the vague and nebulous musical ideas I had been grasping at seemed to come together,

and the first movement of a sonata for two clarinets took shape in my brain, and I wrote it down then and there. It’s a movement of questioning uncer-tainty-you'll be able to hear it later in the year from the YC stations. The second movement is of hushed escape from reality into a dream world, and the third is of harsh rebellion bordering on hysteria. It reflects, I suppose, the fact that I was going into the Royal Air Force and bitterly resented it. When it was performed at the Wigmore Hall in January, 1956, one man was quite heated in a discussion afterwards about my using a beautiful instrument to make harsh sounds. Incidentally, though a movement seems to take its shape frequently in a short burst of mental activity, of course constant alteration goes on. This sonata had four completed versions before the first performance and two after." However heated the member of the Wigmore Hall audience may have become, the Musical Times says of this sonata: This was a very gifted work indeed, excellently written for the instruments, with invention that was consistently interesting. Mr Elton has a real talent for formulating thematic ideas which will yield memorable continuations and furnish lively parts for two players. Each of his three movements had its own character, and the flexibility and lish of his technique auger well for the uture. Chester’s have published this work. ‘Elton went into a Royal Air Force Band and promptly wrote a Symphony for Military Band which, perhaps not surprisingly, proved too difficult for the band he was playing in. The Nottingham (continued on next page)

Police tried it over at one rehearsal. They were interrupted by a Salvation Army Officer: "We're having a Holiness Meeting next door. If you don’t stop that terrible noise we'll call the police." "The police? We are the ruddy police! Come to think of it, boys, it is a bit of a row. Well, come down from Mars, lads, get out ‘Let the People Sing.’ " When the composer of the row left the R.A.F. he gave the work to the Irish Guards Band, whose bassoons objected that they couldn’t hold one note for a minute and a half, overlooking the fact that the score ‘tells them they can breathe whenever they like, provided they do it at the end of a bar. The BBC now has the work which it hopes to do when it has a military band. The trials of a composer! But still, when Anthony Elton was released from military service he celebrated by a walking tour in the Ardennes, from, which came a string quartet which is to be played at a Wellington concert-by the Rosner Quartet-a work whose happiness reflects the circumstances of -its origin. Back in London working under Len- nox Berkeley the gloom of a city in which he had no money and no prospects crystallised in a short symphonic suite for orchestra whose musical directions tell its character-appassionato, melacolio, furiosa, patetico. Occasionally, though, a happy interlude produced something a little lighter, like the little work for small orchestra calleq "Gorgeous Food." (Presumably with no repeats.) Anthony Elton thinks his best work so far is in the Symphonic Suite and in two serenades for orchestra-the first being four sound portraits of women, three real and one imaginary, and the other a, number of impressionistic sketches, of which the fourth has a very peculiar origin. . "I’m very fond of cats," he says, "and at Curacao I brought on to the ship a hungry cat from the wharf-in complete ignorance of peculiar regulations about quarantine and so on, and took it down to the cookhouse. When I came up on deck a little while later I found a furious row going on bétween the ship’s captain and a Curacan policeman. One was refusing the poor animal on. -the grounds that it came from the ship, and the other because it came from Curacao. I discreetly faded away, but I heard later. that they had compromised by drowning the cat, which made. me feel awful. That night the moonlight on the sea glinted like the eyes of the poor cat, and the fourth movement of the serenade was born in my mind." What now? He is working at odd jobs to keep himself, one of which included hese, Sh the albums of Elvis Presley! He’ is also living in Wellington writing’ music* furiously: two sets. of songs, some will be sung by Robin Gordon and Peter Nisbet in the half-hour. broadcast which will also include’ the two-clarinet sonata. A concert of his works, given in the Lecture Hall of the Miho we Public. Library on May 10, included the string quartet and a Pastoral Air for flute and string ‘trio, played by James Hopkinson and the Rosner Trio, And all the time, he is keepi Saragtt4 in| mind his in "After ¢ i, | mposer." AP a ap Pex A ye oes: I'm a