Andrew Ford is a composer, writer, and broadcaster, and has won awards in all three capacities, including the prestigious Paul Lowin Prize for his song cycle, Learning to Howl. His music has been played throughout Australia and in more than forty countries around the world. Since 1995 he has presented The Music Show each weekend on ABC Radio National. He is the author of eleven books, including The Song Remains the Same: 800 years of love songs, laments and lullabies (with Anni Heino). We review his new book, The Shortest History of Music.

What was the first performance that made a deep impression on you?

Athol Fugard’s Dimetos at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1976, with Paul Scofield, Yvonne Bryceland, and Ben Kingsley. At the end, Dimetos (Scofield) has a monologue during which he begins to juggle and finally falls about laughing. I imagined making an opera from the play and many years later, when Fugard was in Sydney, asked his permission, which he granted. It hasn’t happened yet.

When did you realise that you wanted to be an artist yourself?

I’m not sure that wanting came into it. I began composing in my mid-teens, but up to the age of twenty-one my intention was to become a primary school teacher. I’d finished my music degree and was about to take up a place at a teachers’ college when I was encouraged to apply for a job running the music department at Bradford University – a technological university without a music department. There were two choirs and an orchestra to conduct, a concert series to run and time to compose. Primary school teaching still seems like the most important job in the world, though.

What’s the most brilliant individual performance you have ever seen?

Royal Festival Hall, London, 1982. Maurizio Pollini playing Boulez’s Piano Sonata No. 2, from memory.

Name three performers you would like to work with.

Víkingur Ólafsson, Miriam Margolyes, and Taryn Fiebig. In 2020, Taryn was to have sung the title role in my opera Rembrandt’s Wife, for Opera Australia, its production postponed in the pandemic. Now, even if the production were to go ahead, it would be without Taryn, who died in 2021.

Do you have a favourite song?

It changes every day; but I have a favourite piece which hasn’t changed in fifty years, namely Britten’s Spring Symphony. It’s a choral symphony, setting a veritable anthology of English poetry, and one of the composer’s few genuinely optimistic works.

And your favourite play or opera?

I keep returning to The Tempest, not least as a source of texts or titles for my own pieces. Even on the page it has such a strong atmosphere. It’s hard to name a single opera, although Thomas Adès made a good fist of The Tempest.

And your favourite writer and favourite composer?

Today it’s Auden and Mozart.

How do you regard the audience?

Quizzically. I find myself wondering who they are.

What’s your favourite theatrical venue in Australia?

Probably the Belvoir St Theatre, because you’re so close you can’t help but feel part of it all.

What do you look for in arts critics?

Knowledge, insight, kindness, empathy.

Do you read your own reviews?

Yes, and it’s wonderful when a critic has really understood the work. It’s nothing to do with praise; at least one critic has written glowing reviews of my music and books while completely missing the point.

Money aside, what makes being an artist difficult – or wonderful – in Australia?

When I came here from England, forty years ago, there was suddenly no pressure to be in a stylistic camp. I felt free and still do.

What’s the single biggest thing governments could do for artists?

Ask us how they can best help. Which, in fairness, Tony Burke did.

What advice would you give an aspiring artist?

Don’t be in a rush.

What’s the best advice you have ever received?

‘Just use your ears, love.’ I was nineteen or twenty, studying composition at university, and the advice was from Michael Tippett, who visited the department for a week or so. As advice, in fact, it’s pretty awful, but I was enmeshed at the time in all manner of charts and musical systems, and Tippett’s words liberated me.

What’s your next project or performance?

I’m putting the finishing touches to I Sing the Birth, a Christmas sequence for treble voices and electric guitar commissioned by Luminescence Children’s Choir (Canberra), together with the Flanders Boys’ Choir, the Estonian TV Girls’ Choir, and Aquinas College Schola Cantorum (Perth). The words are by Ben Jonson, Christina Rossetti, Mark Tredinnick, and Judith Nangala Crispin (among others). I’m hopeful of getting to three of the performances, including those Flemish boys in Antwerp Cathedral a few days before Christmas.