Neil Heyde: “Finding ‘real’ questions and ‘inventing’ responses? Dispatches from the artistic research front”
This is the alternative text for audio version of visiting professor Neil Heyde's keynotee lecture during the SibA Research Days event in March 2021
Length of recording: 43 minutes
Speaker: Neil Heyde
wo- an unfinished word
(word) an uncertain passage in speech or an unrecognised speaker
(-) an unrecognisable word
(–) unrecognisable words
[pause 10 s] a pause in speech of at least 10 seconds
, . ? : a grammatically correct punctuation mark or a pause in speech of less than 10 seconds
Transcription notes
Neil Heyde: I want to say a big thank you to the Sibelius Academy for inviting me to participate in this conference. I have been really enjoying listening everyone’s presentations. Above all, though, for giving me this visiting professorship, which will allow me to work with you for a couple of years.
Neil Heyde: I’m going to begin and tell you a little bit about myself and then I’m gonna go forward to some principles that I found useful doing artistic research. I grew up in Canberra, in Australia, in a music-loving family of scientists. I was very lucky, that in my last two years of school, I had an exceptional cello teacher Nelson Cook, who’d grown up in rural New South Wales and then gone on to become principal cello of the London Symphony Orchestra.
Neil Heyde: Without him, I really doubt, I would’ve become a musician at all. Because I needed someone to help show how seriously one could do this. I think he was, in that sense, an incredibly inspirational figure. And I wanna say that the dual position of growing up very far away from the centre of classical music, whatever that might mean, but yet somehow also very close to a musical heritage through other people, and that through direct contact with the material itself, I think that has really stuck with me.
Neil Heyde: It means I’m keenly aware that almost all of us, are almost always foreigners, either through place or time, in relation to music that we play. The past is a foreign country (chuckles). And building a kind of empathy with something foreign to us is a really central part of being a performing musician. And, in a different way, I think it’s also central to the act composition.
Neil Heyde: So I came to London as an undergraduate, and there – here -, I managed to study cello with William Pleeth, an extraordinary teacher. I became aware afterwards he taught me as much how to think as how to play. And that was very important. After working with him I found myself playing awfully a lot of new music. For quite a few years I was in an improvising ensemble. We also commissioned lots of composers, but it was made of sitar, tabla, flute, keyboards, and cello.
Neil Heyde: And for me that was a really valuable time because I was working on music where I could be on my own. It was something new, others were not doing it, as a period of self-discovery, it was wonderful. During that time I wrote a theory and analysis doctorate on <todo> because one couldn’t then, perhaps in Finland I could’ve done, but one couldn’t then in the UK do an artistic research doctorate. I slowly found myself to become a cellist of a string quartet, and eventually to become head of postgraduate programs at the Royal Academy of Music in London.
Neil Heyde: And I think it’s quite important to say, that in London I’m responsible for all of the postgraduate programs. The doctor programme and the master’s programmes where we got 400 or so students. And because of this, I have a sensitivity to the belonging of the research that’s probably quite different to what you feel in Sibelius Academy, where your research environment for the doctorate degrees is larger and more varied. So what I’m going to say today might or might not correlate very closely with what colleagues in Sibelius Academy are saying. But I hope that because it’s in a new voice, because it will be from a new perspective, it might tell a little differently. And sometimes it’s just the difference between the use of one word rather than another that makes all the difference in how we move forwards.
Neil Heyde: As a visiting professor I think I can probably allow myself to focus a little differently here. Your doctorate program’s just a little 30 thirty years old, it’s now been roughly 30 years since the Royal Academy of Music moved our entire cohort of undergraduate students from an old-fashioned, if you’ll like, a conservatoire professional training frame to a university degree one. We’re now an independent college of the University of London.
Neil Heyde: I use that word frame carefully. We’ve had to change things in the picture itself, but what’s interesting is we’ve changed the frame around what we’ve done. And 30 years might sound like a long time, but I won’t to think about how long it is or isn’t. In the UK, there was a huge change of landscape across higher education in the 1990s. Lots of institutions that had not been universities became universities at that point. There was a major aim in doing this to bridge social divisions as well as disciplinary ones, to move disciplines that hadn’t been part of university life into the university, but also to encourage participation in a kind of university education from people who hadn’t been participating.
Neil Heyde: And you’d think that with 30 years we’d have had enough time to get used to this new landscape. It is certainly now very familiar to us, so perhaps it’s easy for us to forget how much the new frame we have for our activity in the conservatoire sector impacts what we do. There’s a much longer established understanding of the differences between the habitats dentists, doctors and the architects need and the kinds we build for research scientists, mathematicians, scholars of the classical world. And I don’t wanna go into those distinctions here, but I do feel the most important thing that any university level training needs to engender is the sense that learning that how to renew and continue to develop skills is much more important than the skills themselves.
Neil Heyde: Of course, given the fundamental notion of preservation in the etymology of conservatoire, and I noticed your vice-dean talked to me about uni arts being a “developetoire” or something like that. It’s not surprising that distinctive fault lines will appear in environments like ours and these are not new to the history of academies. As with any culture change it is not easy for us on the ground to gauge how far we are into any new era, or indeed whether there is really a new era at all.
Neil Heyde: some things move really fast and others don’t. And teacher-pupil generations work very differently to parent-child ones. Teachers produce or reproduce faster, vastly more numerously, very polygamously and often for many decades. And in that generational sense we are an enormous way from the 1990s. But many of the senior staff in institutions, those who still make the big strategic decisions are still the children of an earlier time. And it is worth remembering there’s enormous overlap across teacher-pupil generations.
Neil Heyde: We got plenty of 2nd generation children teaching at the academy, I think some 3rd as well, there may even be 4th generation children. So that side of it can be very compressed but also, I can claim cello grandfathers born in 1859 as Julius Klengel who taught William Pleeth, and 1876 Pablo Casals who taught Nelson Cook for a time. And that’s not a particularly extraordinary fact. It’s just possible because those two very important teachers to me were not young men when I studied with them.
Neil Heyde: Just before lockdown, our first big lockdown, I gave a cello duo concert with the extraordinary Sri Lankan cellist Rohan de Saram, dedicatee of the last of the Berio’s Sequenzas and a huge amount of music. Rohan is now 80 years old. In our work together I was constantly struck both by the sense of history and context he carries with him, both in stories and sense of rootedness, or what I feel is a kind of certainty in his playing. And by the way he approached everything from the first principles, as if looking at something for the first time, asking the kinds of questions one would except of an 18-year-old.
Neil Heyde: I think there’s an important lesson there in understanding longevity and a remainder that interesting musicians don’t stand still through a long-time. I’m often struck by David Oistrakh saying of Pablo Casals’ in the 1960s by which time he was in his 80s. Oistrakh said it feels like the first blossoming of his creative talent is still continuing.
Neil Heyde: So teaching is of course also a learning experience. Although, teacher-pupil generations and relationships may move really quickly, institutions and the wider sector culture have enormous built-in resistances. I sometimes wonder if I had been a cello teacher at the Royal Academy of Music during this period rather than someone who has become responsible for programs, would I feel uncomfortable about some aspects of the new world?
Neil Heyde: Are we in danger of losing something? What is the place of our craft in this new context? And perhaps, most importantly, am I maintaining the kind of professional development I might need to stay relevant or current? The good news in responding to these questions and one of the reasons I like to start with literature or context that are outside the frame of the last 30 years, is there’s plenty of reassurance from then when the environment we now have didn’t exist.
Neil Heyde: I’ve cut this film together from a much more extended interview between Pinchas Zuckerman and Nathan Millstein. It is a (-) this Christopher Nupen’s film “Nathan Milstein in Portrait”. And I play this film to all of the new postgraduates when they arrive at the Royal Academy of Music in London and it’s fun to play it because I know it generates a couple of laughs and it’s one of those things we can’t do on YouTube when we are sharing these events. Well, he says things that could sound contradictory, I’ve cut it together a little bit unfairly, because I put things closer than they took place in the real interview.
Neil Heyde: He also says a couple of things that are perhaps a little bit naughty or we wonder whether we are even allowed to say them. I love the fact you can feel an audience sensing actually important stake here.
Neil Heyde: So I’ll just play this…
(violin music begins) [0:11:38.6]
(film clip ends) [0:13:53.6]
Neil Heyde: I wanna unpack a couple of little things from that very quickly. The first is that he uses think and practice interchangeably, that he’s very comfortable to just to flip between the two of those. And I think that’s quite an interesting to pick out, but more than anything it is the comment he says at the end, and that’s the reason I really play this video for students at the Academy. What he says is “I love the violin more than I love music” and that, possibly, sounds like a contradiction of think with your brain and not your hands. But I think this complex relation between the instrument and what it is we do as musicians and the fact that this is revealed in this rather short interview, I think is lovely. I really like this word he uses “invent” something. I’ll come back to it several times today.
Neil Heyde: So we now have well-developed and institutionally supported environment for artistic research, but I think it is worth making an observation that compared to many other disciplines, we still have a lot of concern and energy invested in trying to define the discipline and in grappling with ways to establish viable or credible methodologies.
Neil Heyde: I think it’s more important for us, in what I still feel at the early stages of the discipline, to keep focus on the kinds of questions we are asking and the audiences for whom they matter rather than the approaches we are taking in answering them.
Neil Heyde: My personal experience has been that learning how to ask questions is the fundamental challenge we face. Although it is relatively easy to see in the broader sense what some of the fundamental questions about our musical practice and its role in society might be, it’s harder to pull those close centripetally, to our own work.
Neil Heyde: When we really know what questions we’re asking and why, it’s usually much easier to know what to do to respond than if the questions are half-formed. I use this word “real” in my title “Real Questions”. What is real is something only the individual research can judge. It’s not for an environment to determine. But I think it’s a very good question we should ask of ourselves all the time.
Neil Heyde: Am I answering something that I know how to answer, or am I answering the question that I need to ask? William Pleeth used to stop me sometimes in my cello lessons and give me a very particular look with his eyebrows slightly raised and say: You don’t know what you want to do there. By which he almost always meant that any technical challenge I was facing would be resolved once I decided what I actually wanted to achieve. In other words work out the question first, think with your brain, not with your hands.
Neil Heyde: But one lesson in particular during my first year with him stands out as critical for why and how I’ve ended up where I am. I was working with him on the Debussy Sonata and he was prompting me to be more actively inventive in how each small phrase was built. He drew my attention to the enormous variety of instructions on that score, helping me to recognize that not one of these can actually speak for itself. One could say that each instruction requires interpretation, but what I left his house (-) with that day was a sense of absolute clarity that each of those moments required decision. This may not be exactly what Millstein is hinting at when he says “invent anything”, but I found his choice of the word invention a useful one. Not least because it captures the kind of enterprise, I feel we can be engaged in day in and day out, whether working under direction or entirely self-directed. It’s on the one hand a challenge to do better, as Millstein puts it, but on the other something that feels more recognizable and comfortable in an artistic context, than the more typical research requirements that demand originality or innovation.
Neil Heyde: I’ve extracted seven strategic approaches to artistic research that have emerged from what I’ve recognized as real questions encountered in my own practice. And I won’t have time today to talk about all of them, so I’m just gonna choose four. On the surface they are intentionally obvious. I like to joke sometimes about calling myself “professor of stating the obvious”. But I hope that some of the specific scenarios that come out of them may not be.
Neil Heyde: What I was trying to do, what I have always been trying to do is find the questions I was already asking and to ask them better. And I’m often struck by how scientists think in relation to this and I’ve found a lovely quotation from Abraham Pais, who was for a while an assistant to Niels Bohr, the great Danish physicist. This is from a memoir and he says that “the first thing Bohr said to me it would be only profitable to work with him if I understood he was a dilettante. The only way to I knew how to react to this unexpected statement was with a polite smile of disbelief. But evidently, Bohr was serious. He explained how he had to approach every new question from a starting point of total ignorance. It’s perhaps better to say that Bohr’s strength lay in his formidable intuition and insight, rather than erudition.”
Neil Heyde: I’m not saying we need to approach something from a position of ignorance, but it is quite wise to spend time on the question before we start rushing to the answers. So the first of those points there: take a forensic approach to the materials. The language of the court there is not an accident, I like the idea that we might try to build a picture of circumstances and of intentionality. To me these feel like very important things, and Debussy’s music was a really ideal starting point for me. Partly because of his musical text is so exceptionally rich in information, but because when you start looking closely, that material so provocatively reveals both a penetrating critical intellect and a completely natural and intuitive feel for the moment.
Neil Heyde: It’s one of the reasons why I think his music is so difficult to perform and why I feel, it is not by a large very well performed. It’s pretty clear from what we know of him that he’d be disappointed I think by a lot of the easy solutions people take to the challenges of his music. Composers of course they’re busy people. They have other things to do with their time than be clever or complicated. So when I started to follow-up some years later on William Pleeth’s invocation to respond to the difference between, say, cédez or a ritardando or (word 0:21:39.5). It was quite a shock to discover just how individual and varied Debussy’s indications were. And I’ve a feeling even Debussy would’ve been surprised.
Neil Heyde: To give you a sense of how specific the challenge is and how real the question “what can I do here or what should I do here, or how could I do this?”, how real those are. I want to give you some raw numbers. If you’re bored and you want a challenge for the rest of this talk, you can try to see if you can come up with a similar variety. So in the music he wrote during the last six years of his life – there’s a very complicated history of his use of his different languages on his scores – so he’s reintroduced Italian in about 1912, having avoided for the most part during the middle of his career.
Neil Heyde: He was only writing really for three of those years, because he was very ill, he had a form of rectal cancer. During that period he used 60, that’s six-zero, 60 different ways of getting or being slower. So that’s not a tempo setting, that’s a tempo differential. And 71 different ways of getting or being faster. In expressive language he was just as inventive, and it is not difficult to predict the basic ingredients of what a string-player is likely to do to respond to a dolce indication for example, but the demand for invention when we see the variance Debussy produces during those last years raises the hurdle bar. If we add the French (word) 0:23:29.1, which partly overlaps in meaning, we have over 50 combinations.
Neil Heyde: And sometimes I actually enjoy just reading those out, one after another, because it is quite a wonderful experience to talk through that range. This is clearly no accident, even if it was not actively intended. Debussy’s investment in this labelling speaks to something that neither we nor he can ever fully grasp, but his imaginative investment needs in some way to be met by our own.
Neil Heyde: Some of those instructions are repeated relatively frequency, and belong to a kind of a core language, but others he reaches for only once and speaks to something unique. And by making a list of those things, which is a very task for me to do, I felt like had a kind of a privileged or special access to something even Debussy himself wouldn’t been fully aware of.
Neil Heyde: That’s both a useful working tool and creatively exciting. What can these labels do? Are they private exchanges between the composer and the performer only? Would there be something interesting to do with sharing those more widely? But above all, what I think it helped point me towards was how cinematic Debussy’s approach to composition is and therefore why the way you manage getting from one bit of material to the next is so important. In other words, as a cinema editor, the way a dissolve or a chart is managed is fascinating.
Neil Heyde: So out of that work, which came from a cello lesson. I wrote a doctoral thesis on Debussy’s Sonatas that became about rhetoric, and that was a theory and analysis piece of writing. There was no artistic research. I’m now working on an edition of them for the Earth Complet and that’s been very interesting, because the initial editors of those pieces often mangled the instructions because of them are really quite weird. I think it is very important we put those back. I’ve just finished writing a chapter on Reveals Music, which is a piece written in response, in homage, to Debussy that grew out of a wonderful book by Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, the French violinist who worked very closely with the Ravel in the 20’s.
Neil Heyde: And in that I’m trying to make an argument for how doing what it says on the score is playful. Why that is important. And then, I’ve made some films. Some of these are motivated by ideas of musical choreography, I come back to it in a moment, but in a way one of the principal drivers for this film and documentary of Brian Ferneyhough’s time and motion study for cellist and electronics, was that I wanted to share something about how that music communicates in notion with an audience.
(music starts playing 0:26:41.6)
(music ends 0:28:01.5)
Neil Heyde: So the second of my points. Means and ends may not map directly to one another. In a lot of the teaching I do at the teaching at the Academy, in relation to chamber music for example, a lot of that is to do with to do with ideas we associate with ideas of clarity and simplicity. Clarity is usually associated with cleanliness and simplicity; people assume you do simple it will simple. I’m always interested in revealing that clarity isn’t necessarily about cleanliness and simplicity often achieved with very complex means.
Neil Heyde: What I’m gonna talk about here today is a larger project of mine, an instrument related one, and I’d be very interested to hear some of the talks that have happened here. But that is about the ways that instruments transcend the function of being tools for us to make music. This, in a way, this project came again accidentally out of something that happened in my life. I had played the same beautiful old Italian cello for more than 25 years, in fact you’ve just seen it in the Ferneyhough film, and I got offered out of the blue by a big collection in Taiwan a lot of money to buy the instrument.
Neil Heyde: It raised some very fundamental questions about what my relationship with that instrument was, what it would mean if I parted with it. And I sold it. There’s a long story about that. But in selling that I sold, in a way, 25 years of a relationship of building something that then had to be rebuilt in another way with another things. And I thought I was gifted something in being able to see that process again. And to realize how much easier it was to play new things on my new insrtrument rather than the things I had known on my other one.
Neil Heyde: I called it “The Inner Life of the Cello” and it was a framed concept, a half an hour talk about what it means to build an instrument. What is a cello? How many cellos go into making it up? Then a performance of something that I’m gonna give you a two-minute version of, Seven Pieces by Michael Fennessy, that kind of explore the history of the cello played on seven different cellos. Instruments I don’t know, I borrowed from the collection at the academy and you can see in the very beginning of the each of those how I’m picking an instrument I’ve hardly played and performing. And then an interview with Michael afterwards.
Neil Heyde: So it was framed concept to try and get people not to compare the instruments with one another, but to think about how these different kinds of voices help us understand what an instrument is. So I’m gonna play you a version that is only two minutes long, this is Zuben (word 0:31:02) at the piano with me.
(Heyde starts playing a cello 0:31:05)
(music ends 0:33:33)
Neil Heyde: Find personal and specific entry points, not general or stylistic ones. Of course we need to learn certain stylistic habits, but I worry that traditions, styles, performance practices, these are juggernauts that raze the individual. There’s a lovely disclaimer written by the violin player of the Cornish Quartet in the 1990s when they re-issued recordings, that were privately, in public.
Neil Heyde: And you can see he was very embarrassed on some level about what they had done there. But, when he describes what they were trying to do, I thought “this feels like an attitude that predates later 20th Century understanding of what performance practice is supposed to be, but it feels like an interesting challenge for us”. So I’m gonna read it for you.
Neil Heyde: He says: “Characteristic for the Cornish Quartet was, I think, often seemingly improvisatory and spontaneous music making, which was stimulated by our playing by heart. Our efforts aimed at giving something like human character and gesture to the notes, terms such as ‘classic’, ‘romantic’, ‘style’, and categories like these were not familiar to us. We did not know what to make of them. Our masterwork, no matter when or where it was written, is a world for itself. It’s uncategorizable, a singular wonder which has to be newly discovered and felt each time.
Neil Heyde: I’m just gonna show you a tiny example of a project I’m working on at the moment that is about personal and specific entry points. What you have there is the beginning of the strangest six pieces written for me by Richard Beaudoin, an American composer. This, as you will be able to see on the top, is based on a micro-timing of a recording made by Pablo Casals on the 23rd of November 1936. I give you a moment to look at how the notation works there.
Neil Heyde: So what I’m being asked to do here is that one level, to make a slow time copy of what Casals did. But in making in that copy in the same timeframe as him you can’t copy. There are certain features, qualities that what Casals does that I’m tied to very specifically by rhythmic notation here. But many other things that I have to find for myself in the moment, in this performance. I’ll just find the beginning of this performance.
(music briefly plays and then stops 0:36:28)
Neil Heyde: I’ll just play you a tiny bit of this.
(shuffling of papers for 10 seconds, steps)
(cello music starts playing 0:36:42)
(music ends 0:38:42)
Neil Heyde: That’s by talking to this last point. Everything is contention, everything depends on something else. I find this useful always to think about it. It reminds us how nothing stands by itself. I’ve been struck by it several times in these research days already. People have spoken, I’ve said “No Man is an Island”, the title of the John Donne poem from that 17th Century. What I find interesting about that: it is both how we are free and how we relate to other things. So everything depends on something else in a musical performance, and in composition too. The ability to respond to what is actually happening rather than what one might have envisaged, requires both kind of preparation and an ability to forget.
Neil Heyde: I like the fact Keith Jarred used to say “I aspire to not to know what is coming next”. One of my sources of inspiration is a piece of writing by young Friedrich Nietzsche, which was at one time translated as “On the uses and the abuses of history for life”, in which he expounds the dangers for society and the individual by being overwhelmed by history. He articulates the fundamental need to live in and for the moment, to use history for life and not be overrun by it.
Neil Heyde: But as I get older, and my sense of being woven into the musical world with a long history gets richer, the past feels closer and closer. How our musical forbearers sing much more loudly in my head. In all of my work history is much more present now than it was before. What happens on stage, is something quite different to what happens in rest of our musical lives. A kind of doing, rather than thinking that Millstein exchanges fluently with practice. We know Millstein was proud of his ability to invent different fingerings on the spot, but we also know that facility doesn’t come by accident.
Neil Heyde: Invention in this sense could be described as something that consist both of a process of preparation, practice, thinking, that extends across a lifetime, and of drastic decision in the moment. Although these things are clearly different from one another, they are mutually dependent. In an apparent paradox, a conservatoire, an academy within an university, needs to be able to engender both a profound critical understanding of, respect for, and empathy with musical texts and objects, and the things that they signify. And also an innate grasp of when and how we can or must step in and take authority over them. In Nietzsche’s language: forget them.
Neil Heyde: I quite like that piece of Richard Beaudoin’s we’ve been just looking at. You know, is that a piece of Bach? I feel very connected to both Bach and Casals there, but I feel very aware of that piece of artwork is something else. For me that is a really helpful way of engaging with this.
Neil Heyde: I think our quite new artistic research environment has an important responsibilities in both different directions: taking control of oneself, and the empathy for others. But perhaps its special contribution in the longer term could be in helping to find and articulate strategies for making the transitions between these two worlds. That’s where I’m gonna stop it. Thank you.