John Purser: Well-orchestrated lessons

The National

09-06-2025

At the same time, a touch of something approaching arrogance is helpful.
My fellow composition student at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music was John Geddes. I remember once we were in the back row of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music choir in the alas no more St Andrew's Hall.
Ranked below us were the rest of the choir, the full body of the Scottish National Orchestra, and a team of solo singers of major repute. As the conductor, Alex Gibson, came on to the usual applause, John turned to me and, with an expansive gesture spreading his arms to indicate the vast forces ranged below, announced: 'These are the rocks that I chisel!'
John chiselled some magnificent rocks, especially in his Second Symphony.
Books on orchestration are all very well and some remarkably insightful – notably Ebeneezer Prout's two-volume work The Orchestra. Poor man, with a name like that his credibility is shot to hell before you even read a word or hear a note. His Clarinet Concerto and Organ Concerto No 1 are on YouTube. They sound a lot better than his name.
The best lessons come from following orchestral scores, attending orchestral rehearsals, asking your fellow students to try things out, and listening to professional musicians. Orchestral musicians are a tough bunch and not all of them will smooth your path if difficulties arise.
The one utterly unforgivable thing is mistakes in the parts. They waste time and annoy the hell out of everybody, not least the conductor whose business it is to fight your corner. Even with modern part extraction from computer typeset scores, mistakes can occur.
Computer typesetting is a wonderful thing, but it does deprive the musicians of that sense of direct contact with the composer which you can get from her or his hand-written parts. It's the difference between a handwritten and a typed letter. This particularly applies to the full score which is used by the conductor.
Each composer has to work out his own style of orchestration, her own palette. The composer picks the instrumental forces and lays them out in a conventional order, so readers of the score know what is where.
For full symphony orchestra with choir and soloists, woodwind instruments are at the top, brass section next, then percussion and keyboard instruments, soloists and vocal lines: finally the string section. These, if you like, are the tubes of paint.
My first lessons were from Frank Spedding but mostly he left me to my own devices, following the Gordon Jacob and Walter Piston books on orchestration. These provided the basics – the ranges of the various instruments and their fundamental characteristics.
There were little extra snippets of information. If you have only two trumpets and want the effect of four, you can slip in a couple of low flutes if the music is quiet. The audience won't be any the wiser so long as you dove-tail them. The same trick can work blending horns and bassoons.
It wasn't all technical. Gordon Jacob, I was told, once criticised a student of orchestration for overuse of the snare drum, declaring that it would 'sound like somebody pissing into a biscuit tin'.
Two of my composition teachers had diametrically opposed approaches to orchestration. Tippett was all for 'gestures', featuring the different tonal qualities of the instruments. Hans Gál was more for blending the sounds.
A master at both was Tchaikovsky and on one occasion he set up a deliberate surprise. The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, in The Nutcracker features the celesta. In Tchaikovsky's day the instrument (invented around 1886) was a newcomer and very few had heard its fairy-like silvery tones. So keen was Tchaikovsky to spring this sound as a surprise on his audiences that he had the instrument secretly imported by his publisher and kept well out of hearing until the premiere.
He wrote: 'Have it sent direct to Petersburg; but no-one there must know about it especially not Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazounov who might make use of the new effect before I could. I expect the instrument will make a tremendous sensation.'
It did. Its predecessor had been invented in Glasgow by Thomas Machell – the dulcitone, first made in 1860 and used by the French composer Vincent d'Indy in Le Son de la Cloche in the 1880s. In the celesta, the hammers hit metal plates: in the dulcitone they hit metal tuning forks.
These days, however, composers often introduce instruments from indigenous cultures and even archaeological reconstructions such as Bronze Age horns.
As for the Highland bagpipes, they were first used with orchestra by Aloys Fleischmann in Cork, then Ian Whyte in his ballet Donald of the Burthens, then by Edward MacGuire in Calgacus and then in a kitsch colonialist scenario by Peter Maxwell Davies in Orkney Wedding with Sunrise.
It used to be the best known, being in the 'Donald, where's your troosers?' class of artistry, but Bear McCreary's Outlander has overtaken it by an American mile. Anyway, there's no manual for combining bagpipes and symphony orchestra, not even Norman del Mar's magnificent Anatomy of the Orchestra.
Norman (above) was not to be messed with – a large man with a formidable intellect. To orchestral musicians, he was variously known as 'The Mass of Life' (a pun on the title of a composition by Delius), 'The Greatest Waste of Space' (which was not fair), 'The Butcher' (on account of his decisive but inelegant beat), and, more affectionately 'Bubble Bum'.
Confronted by more than 60 hardened professional musicians, many of whom had served in the Second World War and knew what it was like to be made to run 10 times round the parade ground carrying a heavy shell for playing a wrong note, even a Del Mar was put to the test. On one such occasion, he was guiding the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra through a mountain of challenging scores – Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel and the like – deliberately thrown at him by the BBC in London because public protest had prevented them from axing the orchestra.
Norman had a desk with scores to the right of his conductor's podium – the In-Tray, and another to the left – the Out-Tray. They had no time for proper rehearsals, only run-throughs, and Norman was running them.
At one point, in the frantic passage of scores and decisive beating of time, Norman's baton flew out of his hand and fell to the floor. He was a tall man, standing on a podium and barked out: 'My baton please!' Quick as a flash, the principal violinist, Peter Gibbs (who had piloted Spitfires during the Battle of Britain) deliberately dropped his bow and turned to the second desk of violins and demanded: 'My bow please!'
But Norman loved these people and understood them better than many a conductor, taking in his stride the fourth horn, Billy Bull who, on being told by Del Mar that he couldn't see him, replied: 'Ah cannae see you either, sir, but ah can feel your presence.' Never was a truer word spoken.
So I was frightened but fortunate that Norman gave an early piece of mine a run-through with the same orchestra. It made use of sundry effects – singing at the same time as playing, different kinds of mute and so on. Norman was immensely encouraging but also warned me against striving for effect.
A year later, I got my comeuppance in that department from the timpanist in the Radió Teilefis Éireann Symphony Orchestra.
His name was Kurt Hans Goedicke and this was back in 1962 so I was only 19 and he was still in his 20s. He subsequently acquired an international reputation and is more or less a legend in his own time.
I had won the Radió Éireann Carolan Prize for orchestral variations on Amhran Dochais.
One of the variations had a fanfare for the brass, followed by a solo for the timpani. Four timpani, one timpanist. I was really looking forward to hearing this. I thought it would sound spectacular. The brass section sounded great but the timpani bit was very disappointing. Too slow, almost stumbling.
During the coffee break Kurt came to me with the timpani part. The conversation went as follows, he with a thick German accent: 'Zees timpani part – she is ver difficult. Ver difficult indeed.'
'I'm sorry. I thought it would be fine.'
'You see, I cannot keep crossing my arms like zis.'
He demonstrated the knots he would get into when one arm had to cross over the other and the first one had to be retrieved from underneath in no time at all to get to the next of the four timpani. Truly impossible and I hadn't thought of it.
'O-o-oh! I'll try to re-write it then.'
'But zis is ze original inspiration, ja?'
'It's what I first thought of ... I ...'
'Oh ve must not change. Ve must not change ze original inspiration!'
'I'd rather change it and make it work better.'
'No, no. I tell you vat I do! I praaaactice!'
And with that he forewent his coffee and spent the break trying to make the impossible possible. He got as close as could be but what he really achieved was the very kindliest of lessons in correcting incompetence, and I remain grateful to him to this day.
The improper installation of a Rumford chimney was what won me that Carolan Prize. I composed it in St Kevin's Cottage in Co. Wicklow with the score opened out on the kitchen table.
I was completing a double-page spread a day and the fine turf (peat) ash was falling on the pages and the smoke circulating promiscuously. As soon as you took the anonymous score out of the brown envelope you could smell the turf.
Orchestral scores are not easy to judge and this no doubt saved everyone the bother. I imagine a judge exclaiming as he extracted the manuscript: 'Can you smell that now! Straight from the bogs! That's the winner. No discussion!'
Not imaginary is the sixpence I attached to the start of the trombone part of my Opus 7, adding a signed 'with sympathy'. It came about because I was concerned about the top D. In those days, top Ds on a tenor trombone were not commonplace, and this was a held note in an already high-pitched passage.
I asked him how he would manage it and his answer explains all! 'Well, it's like this, John. When you're going for the top D, you take a sixpence, stick it up your arsehole, squeeze like hell, and when it bends you know you've got it!'