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A LEGENDARY MUSICAL FIGURE

The Opinions of Dame Hilda Tablet

Appearing in The (London) Times on 15th August 1960 was the following article written by "our special correspondent".

"If you want modern music to get a firmer grip on an audience", said Dame Hilda Tablet, with the aphoristic conclusiveness we have learnt to expect from her, "make it last longer. Not that I personally care much whether mine grips people or not. My business is to write music; the audience's business is to like it—if they can—and keep very, very quiet."

Dame Hilda lives, of course, in the centre of a wide but charmed circle of artists; that fact, and the admirable perfectionism which makes her demand that she is physically present at all performances of her music make both her and her music somewhat difficult of access. We are therefore deeply grateful to Mr. Henry Reed and Mr. Donald Swann (who have not only invented Dame Hilda but done more than anyone else to draw public attention to her music) for the somewhat grudging introduction to their eminent friend which made the following interview possible.

Their reluctance is, of course, easily understandable when we remember that my conversation with Dame Hilda meant an interruption of her work on the setting of the Lysistrata, an opera that has absorbed all her attention for some time past. It is, perhaps, the fault of the colourless days in which we live and the social pressures that nag us all into uniformity that Dame Hilda is better known as a vivid and direct personality than as an avant-garde composer whose ruthless search for self-expression transfigures all she touches.

Nevertheless, the composeress (a term Dame Hilda has sometimes resented but has been unable to escape) was ready and at times eager to discuss those aspects of music which mean most to her; these are many, various and sometimes surprising. She feels reluctance to discuss the work of past composers and their possible influence on her. "Of course, I might be forced to mention them on a psychoanalyst's couch, where you're not supposed to keep anything back", she said, "but there's no need to bring them up now."

PRIVATE LIFE PRIVATE

Her life, so far as it can be divorced from her music, she regards as no concern of the public. Although she began to compose while still a schoolgirl, a false start upon a career as an architect delayed her professional entry into the world of music, and though she is known as a conductor and pianist, her musical training, like her adolescence and university career (at Wittenberg) are matters she prefers not to discuss. "We all have little things we're ashamed of", she remarked, "especially after we have been abroad."

Most of Dame Hilda's work is serial in technique, and shows mastery of the extended time-scale of Schönberg as well as of the epigrammatic beauty of the Webern school in such works as the recently broadcast Quintet for Strings and Percussion, which presents its four movements in some two and a half minutes. Nevertheless, serialism in rhythm, dynamics, and orchestration, which Webern's latest disciples regard as the ultimate refinements of serial style, are in reality, she assures me, "simplifications."

"I can't really say that I was attracted to serialism", Dame Hilda told me. "It would be more true to say that serialism was attracted to me, like all these things. Musique concrète, for instance; that found me straight away and I immediately improved it with my musique concrète renforcée." Dame Hilda pointed out to me that the Radio Times recently claimed that listeners to a recent productions of Macbeth could hear in its musique concrète accompaniment "the pounding of Macbeth's heart and the sudden chill that comes over the great banqueting hall at Forres", and reminded me that her musique concrète accompaniment for a production of Antony and Cleopatra at Stratford-on-Avon some years ago actually included the sounds of two hearts—those of her housekeeper and her housekeeper's husband. "But I don't think I've ever tried to express a sudden chill in music", she said in a manner perhaps jocularly cynical. "In fact whenever I've dealt with illness in musical terms, I've preferred something on a larger scale—bubonic plague, for instance.

"I did have a very purely diatonic period—after all, who doesn't. And I am able to tolerate (in the medical sense of the word, of course) jazz and its cognates." Dame Hilda confesses to having sat through the first act of a spectacular American musical. "I was stuck in the middle of a row. In any case, we are all conditioned to listening to everything these days. You can hardly move without hearing jazz from somebody's perishing transistor radio." But nevertheless, if the gap between jazz serialism and musique concrète has grown narrower in the last few years, Dame Hilda's work has done much to bring about the rapprochment.

CLEAN BRAIN

"Many composers who are converted to serialism adopt a very doctrinaire attitude, as though they have been brain-washed. It hasn't been like that with me; I had a clean brain to begin with." Dame Hilda refused to concede that she made this claim in a purely musical sense. "It just didn't need washing", she repeated. "Anyhow, serialism came naturally to me as a means of personal expression—like breathing, rather."

Blessed with a private income, Dame Hilda can remain independent of the whims of public taste and has no need to write down to an audience. "My parents, Sir Eric and Lady Tablet," she said, "exist on the Charles Morgan level, even in conversation. So I don't need to cajole or wheedle the public into liking my work, and problems of popularization do not arise. It's far more important for me to find a librettist than to find an audience." Dame Hilda went on to discuss her differences with Mr. Harold Reith, who provided the text of Emily Butter, her first opera, which was heard at Covent Garden a few years ago. "I was invited to compose something for the International Festival of Democratic Composers, so I asked Mr. Reith to write twenty-four Songs of Common Life that could set to fulfil the commission. He did do, but I found that he had seriously, very seriously, misunderstood the meaning I attach to the word 'common'."

DIATONIC LITTLE NUMBERS

The strong vein of romanticism which many critics have noticed in Emily Butter, Dame Hilda declares, is not in any sense "laid on", but implicit in the emotional situation. "Most of the shop girls", she told me (readers will remember that the opera is set in a modern department store), "were ordinary diatonic little numbers and had to be treated as such. Emily's birthmark aria is a czardas because Miss Elsa Strauss, who sang the role, wanted czardas. The lift music, which is mainly for harpsichord, might be the sort of life music that Meyerbeer would have written if there had been lifts in the department stores of his day. But you ought to regard any romanticism in the work as a means, not as an end."

One of the few things that Dame Hilda shares with other musicians is a feeling that words are best regarded as composer-fodder. "Especially", she say, "when they are disposed upon the page in such a way as to look like poetry. Words look lonely and neglected when they are not set to music." She is certainly the only composer to have set to music her own Last Will and Testament. "It'll contain a few surprises, I fancy. Of course, words sometimes have a will of their own. The shop girl's words in Emily Butter insist upon one sort of music; those of Sapphe [sic] insist on another". This reminded me that Dame Hilda's prowess as a linguist puts a wide range of literature at her commend; as well as English, Latin, and Greek texts, she had set a good deal of German to music (the libretto of Lysistrata is, so far, fundamentally German) including several settings of Schopenhauer. "But only of the best bits," she assured me.

French she admits to finding difficult. "I live in hopes", she says, "of immortalizing Simenon in music. My real trouble is the casting Maigret. I sometimes fear that we shall have to fall back on a male singer for the part. The real trouble is that neither sopranos nor contraltos are as big as they once were. But no doubt this problem will solve itself in time."

In spite of her determined and exploratory musical personality Dame Hilda is always ready to deal with commissions upon their won merits. "I think I may say", she told me, "that Pièces d'occasion for the B.B.C. or anyone else will be amply provided for. If the want musique concrète, they can have it, and if they want plainchant, I'll give it them—fairly plain, anyhow."

NO ANGRY SILENCES

Her relations with performers are, however, a matter of abiding happiness to Dame Hilda. Her friendship with Miss Elsa Strauss ensure that every note she writes is subject to inquiry and criticism, and she is much beloved by orchestras. "I enjoy conducting", she told me, "and I've found that a good deal can be done by good-natured bullying." Referring to the memorable strike of members of the Consolidated Instrumentalists' Union which would have sabotaged the production of Emily Butter had not the players voluntarily returned to the orchestra pit, she said: "The musicians are all right themselves; angry silences don't come naturally to them; it's the shop stewards that sometimes make a wee little trouble."

Dame Hilda does not believe that there is too much music to be heard in London. "Most of what it played isn't really music, anyhow," she insists. "There are all those visits of people like Ansermet, Klemperer, and Monteux. I'm convinced they do no lasting harm, and if people want 'pop' music, why shouldn't they have it? It doesn't often affect me personally—I'm usually in Marrakesh when that sort of thing is going on."