Veery: As your years in music accumulate and your experience in the field grows, what becomes more clear to you?
Christopher Hogwood: How much more there is to do, and also how unfixed one's notions are. Perhaps I should rephrase that to be slightly more personal: how unfixed my “fixed” points were. In the business of recreating music with a sense of historical information, one is very much driven by any change in historical information. Therefore, a performance which seems the ultimate and most satisfactory, the conglomerate of all the information that you have acquired, and all of the feelings that you have for the piece in that one week, can be completely changed by even a minor discovery or a slight overturn of a theory the following week. I would say the same applies to musicians who don't necessarily have an historical basis; I know that many performers who don't include history very strongly in their agenda nevertheless can be very moved by an extraordinary performance of familiar repertoire, and they say, after the concert, they will never go back to that piece again the same way - it's changed their way of hearing it; therefore, it will change their way of performing it.
Veery: Who are your favorite visual artists and why?
Christopher Hogwood: Overlooking any form of art that I would approach because it carried a musical content (I have a drawer full of photographs that I collect because of their comment on music as straight information), I think my feelings are threefold. One is definitely a feeling for the English pastoral, the English watercolorists: the visionaries within the English watercolor tradition which can take you through Samuel Palmer, William Blake, and many of the eighteenth and nineteenth century landscape artists. Caricaturists of all countries I have a great interest in; I like to observe what happens to an artist's vision when there is a deliberate distortion for the viewer. This is found in Italian art and in much Italian music. Vivaldi sometimes uses caricature in a very serious and grim sense, not at all comic. The third category of art that moves me is that with a classical regard for construction and architecture, and architectural styles. I warm to the Palladian style and the paintings of Paul Klee. In fact, I warm to plans or diagrams of any sort, such as architectural elevations or topographical maps
Veery: What musicians do you respect?
Christopher Hogwood: I respect all musicians; anybody who has survived this profession I think deserves admiring. I admire all professionals who do a job; I don't think today's conditions are probably any more threatening or difficult than in any other period, but when one sees the superlative performances by musicians after a sometimes very harrowing routine and in very unconducive situations (the way they can sink their differences and forget the cold temperature, the awful plane journey, and every other inconvenience), these are enormously admirable qualities. Speaking from the point of view of a classical musician, I have a great admiration for those musicians who extemporize, so that covers jazz which is a field that I admire but don't perform in; also those people in classical music who've acquired a sort of freedom in what they do, so that there isn't a conservatoire-type of replicated performance attitude to what's going on: each performance is always a new discovery; they're free and very contagiously happy. Those performers who are newly inventing and newly discovering are some of the most wonderful performers to work with.
Veery: Music and social/political concerns. Does one have business with the other?
Christopher Hogwood: Certainly political concerns have affected and go on affecting music. Political I take in this context to cover commercial as well since the actual funding of music very much concerns everybody dealing with either corporate music, in the sense of larger ensembles and symphony orchestras, or more particularly the teaching of music which I think is a cause of considerable concern worldwide now; very few people feel entirely happy with the attitude their rulers and their governors have taken to support in the dissemination and the education in this particular art field. So, yes, one is always looking, I think, at the stability of a culture that never was intended to be profit-making. It's very much a not-for-profit advocacy. Music to most musicians represents a sort of hospital of the soul; conservatoires and the concert halls are as important to them as the surgeries and the hospitals for one's physical well-being. Social concerns are a different problem. That begins to touch on the relation between social conditions and music which brings one into the area of “political correctness” which is viewed rather differently here than it is in England.
Veery: When you started in music, what did you think of it? What do you think of it now?
Christopher Hogwood: Well, I think much the same. I started in music by accident because my academic training was as a classicist. So, I was at Cambridge doing Greek, Latin, ancient history, philosophy, and linguistics, archeology, while music was something that I performed for fun and had started on only with some application from, I think, the age of fourteen. I was a late arriver, and the idea of a profession in music I think didn’t strike me as something that I would plan towards. It jumped up on me because at Cambridge the music we happened to be performing led a number of us to Medieval and Renaissance instruments, which happened to be what the public was interested in. There were a few ensembles around performing it, involving people like David Munrow and James Bowman in the mid Sixties; we started an ensemble, the Early Music Consort, and without us meaning it to be an international hit, it became one. I've never had any career plan in what I do in music; it's just things that come up. Approximately every ten years, there's quite a shift in what I do; the shift from Medieval music to my own orchestra, The Academy of Ancient Music on period instruments, and ten years after that a shift into conducting modern ensembles. So I think what I felt about it when I was starting was that it was great exploration, it was great fun; we were really very unfairly favored, in being able to do what we wanted to do, and have people applaud and pay us go around the place doing it. I think I really feel the same about it now.
Veery: Of your music, what is your favorite?
Christopher Hogwood: It's always the thing I'm working on at this moment, and in addition there are sometimes very illogical favorites. There tends to be a double stack; there's the favorite cause which will be whatever I'm working on academically at the moment (it happens to be Purcell keyboard music that I'm editing at the moment, so my eyes are very sharp for anything to do with Purcell and Purcell's period). Then in the other stack, it is always the music that one is about to work on tomorrow: one's musical clock never winds down. So, in my head, I've got the Telemann and the Vivaldi of tomorrow night's performance working over; and occasionally a point strikes me, and I suddenly find that I am actually thinking of a specific couple of measures in that music that I want to do something with that I hadn't done before; so somewhere it's ticking over constantly, and by a natural process, the piece that's going to be up next is the one at the top of the pile.
Veery: Did you have any tough years of trying to make it all work, money, prestige?
Christopher Hogwood: No, I think I've not had tough years. As I say, not having intended to get into the business of doing music professionally, taking off in those early years was a surprise and a pleasure, and of course we happened to hit a number of things that had the public's attention, by a lucky coincidence. The moves from Medieval music to the authentic performance of Baroque repertoire and then into the awakening of historical interest amongst bigger symphony orchestras always seem to come at the right moment for me to be able to be doing something that I like. It's true, though, I'm not very good at saying no, which sometimes gets me involved where, with hindsight, I probably should have said, no, let somebody else do it. I've been nearly always surprised by the opportunities that I've been given, and the amount of rope that I've been given to hang myself. But it's fun.
Veery: Do you picture yourself as part of any tradition?
Christopher Hogwood: Yes, in a way, the more one sees surveys of what Harry Haskell calls "the revival of early music," the more one realizes that for a long time there has been a number of people with an interest in presenting music of an earlier time in their own period; one thinks of Mendelssohn and his Bach revivals. I don't see myself in the line of people who deliberately historize themselves; I would associate myself with people who are at the cutting edge, but with one head turned towards the past, in rather a Janus-like posture. There is certainly a tradition from Arnold Dolmetsch through on Thurston Dart to Gustav Leonhardt and Nicholas Harnoncourt; now there's quite a bulge in the line because at the moment I could list fifteen, twenty active names, all roughly the same age in various countries doing this type of work. What is clear is no one of us has the last word. In fact, it may prove to be a very “period” field. One thing that gramophone recordings shows one is that the thing you thought was the last word fifteen years ago now has a terrific feeling of period datedness.
Veery: What disappoints you today about the present music world?
Christopher Hogwood: The lack of repose. I think most musical organizations now feel they have developed and also been threatened by everything that goes under the name of jet set. And certainly from a very active scene in Europe, I'm now beginning to feel the vibrations that there's perhaps a little bit too much activity for the freelance players, perhaps just filling their diaries too full of discrepant dates and activities. As I said, my difficulty of saying no means that too often a week of one thing is followed immediately by a week of another, and that there is little time to sit back and enjoy the fact and deliberate on whatever achievement has been made before going on to the next. In that context, I love working in Australia because by virtue of the number of musical organizations around and the nature of the country and the people, there isn't the opportunity or the pressure to immediately rush from Job A to Job B. Job A is done, and there are a couple of thoughtful, reposeful days in which to look at the job and decide what you really think about it (or to forget what people tell you) and asses it; I find that is an element that at my age appeals to me, and I do find it increasingly absent in some American and quite certainly a lot of European situations.
On a different and broader matter, I might add that I have a pet musical peeve: I am every year more and more afraid of the lack of silence around us. Every other form of pollution is under control except noise, and in particular, MUZAK, unasked for music in spaces where one longs to go for food, for the conversation, for the serenity, for whatever it is, ruined by the intrusion of the very art form that I am most engaged in. What worries me is that that is not seen as a threat to one's well-being just like as tobacco smoke or car fumes.
Veery: What's the best thing someone could say about your work?
Christopher Hogwood: I think the most flattering thing people can say after a concert is how they've been moved by the music rather than the performer. With musicological work, which is the other side of the coin, I think the best thing they can applaud is clarity.
Veery: Do you interest yourself in another field to bring your music an added dimension?
Christopher Hogwood: Yes, this point connects with the architectural blueprint I have in my mind for a musical work. I draw on any of the formal arts, any classical art for its imagery. In didactic terms, and for making easy explanations of what you are wanting, it is effective to use plain simple layman psychological terms, the terminology of drama, analogies with moral forces, characters, question and the answer (musical comings and goings) – “Here is the high point of the phrase”; “here is the languid response”; “here is the sharp contrast”; “here is her reaction to his statement.” Those are very simple descriptions but designedly non-musical. I think there are two levels of getting people to see what you see in music. One is to be absolutely the engineer, to tell them to phrase here in a certain way, to accentuate the C sharp, shorten that rhythm, lighten the bass - purely technical instructions, and often people can only apply them at the spot where you've prescribed them. It doesn't become a language for a larger segment or a whole movement until you've couched these instructions in slightly vaguer but movable terms: “This is the gathering of energy for the conversation of A with B.” The player can then recognize those same characteristics when they crop up later, and thus add to the architectural scheme as well in which these characters and moral forces fit. Then they will know what part of the building they are in as well, and they'll feel, as well as see and hear, the difference between, say, an overture and a sonata.
Veery: Before you got into music, what was on your mind as music is on your mind today?
Christopher Hogwood: Words, I think, and this was why I was drawn to language and construct, neatness of phrase, the sheer mechanical beauty of language. The mechanical thinking must be a hangover from an age when I liked to know how things worked; my father was a scientist. I always get an emotional kick out of a cleverly turned phrase in a novel, in an article, anywhere, even in a news piece. The fact that someone could turn an ironic phrase with three words – I always find tears coming to my eyes because I thought how amazing that just those three words have never been put together in that sequence before, yet at that point they’re just right. It's simply practical precision to put them there, and I think the kick I got out of those sort of recognitions moved fairly swiftly into finding the same sort of joy in the absolute suitability, perfectness, perfect positioning of ideas in music, as soon as I discovered I could understand what music is saying.
Veery: What makes a musician's career rise?
Christopher Hogwood: Fluke, as much as anything. If one knew, then Juilliard would pay you a fortune. So, since I've never been concerned with career, as I say, it sort of happened by chance; I've never picked up the phone to ask someone to let me do something: I wait till it comes to me. There are ways of rising in the traditional ladders, waiting around and becoming the soprano who's just there when the prima donna drops dead. There are those people who rise exactly as they want to rise, in particular in the teaching aspects of music, and very unnoticed and loved of course only by those people who come across them. When one says rise, I think one mustn't always think in Pavarotti terms of worldwide name recognition.
Veery: To what extent does the press play?
Christopher Hogwood: I think it can effect public fears and phases. I'm not very much moved by either good or bad press reaction in terms of criticism. I am constantly appalled at the low level of arts writing nowadays in general; I'm not thinking of critics noticing a particular performance, but set music pieces in most accessible journals and most regular daily or weekly writings that people read. The quality of writing on music is so rarely to be found coming anywhere near, say, the quality of writing on literature that you will get in The New York Review of Books or the Times Literary Supplement. It seems to be an art form that has either gone off into cant and nonsense and a form of vocabulary that I think must cut out a large proportion of potential readers, or it's so vague and wooly and personal, that unless you have a sympathy with the writer from the start, nothing is going to warm you to the topic.
Veery: Is one aspect of a musical composition more significant, for example. tempo over tone, or tone over tempo?
Christopher Hogwood: No, these are integrated, and they are so intertwined that you can't separate them in the art. In individuals, I think you can always feel the particular virtues of certain writers or certain performers: some composers have a particularly exquisite rhythmic sense, the same of some performers; some performers have a particular tonal beauty. You can always pick out the performer who has a weak rhythmic sense, and you try to improve it; but, that can't be done in separation from all the other attributes.
Veery: Who are your favorite writers, poets, novelists, and why?
Christopher Hogwood: Forms of writing that I enjoy most I suppose are biographies, autobiographies, diaries; they all feel to me like one category. Then a real splendid mix of people: Herman Hesse, Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner, J.B. Priestley, Francis Bacon essays, Dryden poetry, many of the Restoration playwrights, and critical writing that includes modern diaries of critics but also criticism, satirical poems. A week feels lost for me without a copy of the English Spectator; I am really moved by fierce and blatantly biased journalistic writing like Auberon Waugh.
Veery: What do you think about when you look at a blank sheet of paper?
Christopher Hogwood: Well, it's more usually a blank screen. When I use a blank sheet of paper these days, I usually think of watermark and its constructions from an academic point of view. Yes, when I look at a blank screen, which is what I use for my writing, I think my first thought is I wish I had analyzed the problem more fully mentally. I once had a long conversation with Michael Frayn where we both were commiserating about the difficulty of actually reshaping your initial idea that you have committed to a word. If only one could have a form of “idea shorthand” so that you could jot down on a piece of paper the stages of developing ideas and
arguments as shapes without actually putting the words into these blanks because the minute you have put the word in its place, it has become a construct which then seems to block the arrival of any later thoughts that might fertilize this egg: the first word has sealed it, and the wall has gone up. The minute I cast my sentence – “Despite his early poverty, nevertheless . . . .” I feel the need of a very sharp editor or critic to come along and say, "Why, ‘despite’, ‘nevertheless’? It's merely your construct that you have chosen to throw these things in to that grammatical form; there is no proven connection between his poverty and his later action.” That's the stage that I'm always worried about when it comes to starting on a blank page.
Veery: What to you is the point of criticism?
Christopher Hogwood: Sharpening our collective instincts.
Veery: Thousands of years ago they heard a bird calling beside the steady sound of a waterfall. Was that music or did it start sometime else?
Christopher Hogwood: It could have been music, and it probably was music to somebody. Therefore amongst those listening, there was “a musician.”
Veery: Would you like to clarify any positions or misconceptions through external sources, people, applied to your work, in a brief way?
Christopher Hogwood: I think the only major misunderstanding that I've had that has rankled was in the course of trying to explain the noninterventionist attitude I have to performing. I don't enjoy over-interpretation or a very strong superimposition of a “grand maestro” effect on a work of art that doesn't ask for that element at its start. A critical theory has evolved that people working in historically informed music-making are somehow opting out of the interpretational business: it's seen as pacificity or a wish to be totally transparent, in the worst sense, letting the music speak for itself, which is a phrase I would use, but with a positive meaning - and don't put into it a lot of your own ego to obliterate what the composer was saying. It's a tricky philosophy to put over in a few words; and it tends in these days of grand maestri of course to look as though
one's advising musicians to cop out. It obviously needs careful expression to make sure that it doesn't sound like a form of surrender – essentially, I would ask the conductor not to stand too heavily between the composer and the listener.
Veery: Do you consider yourself to have a somewhat Romantic sensibility in that you're going to search out an old work for what I think you referred to earlier as its secret treasures, treasures that reveal themselves later?
Christopher Hogwood: I think everybody working in any art, particularly those working in an art that is recreative, are always hoping to discover their own secret cache of repertoire or an unsuspected affinity with something which is not highly prized or has been overlooked. I have my own pet underdogs that I wish to pursue, and I think one develops a certain crankiness (in the English sense) about certain territories, rather like old gentlemen collecting porcelain; you fix on certain patterns, certain styles, certain usages, and certain developments that can be traced through a very particular choice of music. At the moment, I'm very concerned with the concept of the clavichord, a very quiet and private instrument, and the repertoire created for it in the eighteenth century which can never be considered concert repertoire and therefore has attracted a curious type of criticism that because it can't be played in a concert, it can't be considered as highly placed as music written for concert performance; I'm in the process of searching out all I can about this instrument and its repertoire and its milieu. This leads to the question of what constitutes important music and whether we are right to think of music as an exclusively concert activity nowadays.
Veery: Can it be said that when you're looking at your music, you're in a way an architect; you take a blueprint of a composition that exists, and you then construct it into the finished building?
Christopher Hogwood: Yes, there's a slight element of that. Closer I think to the way I feel about music is that I do hear it in architectural terms. I think constructs in music appeal to me very much: I tend to analyze them by some analogy with architecture or an engineering construct. A fugue, a sonata, or a Haydn symphonic movement is in my mind a type of building process, and I think carefully about my way of entering it and leaving it, plus knowing where I am within it. I think a musician needs an image of the temple to identify various shrines that occur within the proportions of the whole thing. The skill of navigating in those pieces/places is distinguishing the incidental from the truly structural. In most of the work I do, and in particular in explaining the form of a piece to a body of musicians to achieve a certain interpretation, I find that the idea of main structural and lesser ornamental features in the piece can give people the most vivid and useful guide to a focused and well-quantified performance
Veery, 1994