Trusting the ensemble - Charles Hazlewood

I am a conductor, and I'm here today to talk to you about trust. My job depends upon it. There has to be between me and the orchestra an unshakable bond of trust, born out of mutual respect, through which we can spin a musical narrative that we all believe in.

Now, in the old days, conducting music-making was less about trust and more, frankly, about coercion. Up until around about the Second World War, conductors were invariably dictators—these tyrannical figures who would rehearse not just the orchestra as a whole, but individuals within it within an inch of their lives. I'm happy to say now that the world has moved on, music has moved on with it.

We now have a more democratic view and way of making music—a two-way street. As the conductor, I have to come to the rehearsal with a cast-iron sense of the outer architecture of that music, within which there is then immense personal freedom for the members of the orchestra to shine. For myself, of course, I have to completely trust my body language; that's all I have at the point-of-sale—it's silent gesture. I can hardly bark out instructions while we're playing, ladies and gentlemen, the Scottish ensemble.

So in order for this to work, obviously, I have got to be in a position of trust. I have to trust the orchestra, and even more crucially, I have to trust myself. Think about it: when you're in a position of not trusting, what do you do? You overcompensate, and in my game, that means you over-gesticulate. You end up like some kind of rabid windmill.

The bigger your gesture gets, the more ill-defined, blurry, and frankly useless it is to the orchestra. You become a figure of fun. There's no trust anymore, only ridicule. I remember at the beginning of my career, again and again these dismal outings with orchestras. I would be going completely insane on the podium, trying to engender a small-scale crescendo—really just a little upsurge in volume. Bugger me, they wouldn't give it to me.

I spent a lot of time in those early days weeping silently in dressing rooms. And how few tiles seemed the words—the words of advice to me from the great British veteran conductor Sir Colin Davis, who said conducting, Charles, is like holding a small bird in your hand. If you hold it too tightly, you crush it; if you hold it too loosely, it flies away. I have to say, in those days, I couldn't really even find the bird.

Now, a fundamental and really viscerally important experience for me in terms of music has been my adventures in South Africa, the most dizzyingly musical country on the planet, in my view. But a country which, through its musical culture, has taught me one fundamental lesson: that through music-making can come deep levels of fundamental, life-giving trust. Back in 2000, I had the opportunity to go to South Africa to form a new opera company.

So I went out there and I auditioned mainly in rural township locations right around the country at about 2,000 singers, and pulled together a company of 40 of the most jaw-droppingly amazing young performers, the majority of whom were black, but there were a handful of white performers. Now, it emerged early on in the first rehearsal period that one of those white performers had, in his previous incarnation, been a member of the South African police force.

In the last years of the old regime, he would routinely be detailed to go into the township to aggress the community. You can imagine what this knowledge did to the temperature in the room—the general atmosphere. Let's be under no illusions: in South Africa, the relationship most devoid of trust is that between a white policeman and the community. So how do we recover from that, ladies and gentlemen? Simply through singing.

We sang, we sang, we sang, and amazingly, new trust grew, and indeed, friendship blossomed. That showed me such a fundamental truth: that music-making and other forms of creativity can so often go to places where mere words cannot. So we got some shows off the ground; we started touring them internationally. One of them was Carmen.

We then thought we'd make a movie of Carmen, which we recorded and shot inside on location in the township outside Cape Town called Khayelitsha. The piece was sung entirely in Plaza, which is a beautifully musical language. If you don't know it, it's called "Oh Carmen of Khayelitsha"—literally Carmen of Khayelitsha. When I play a tiny clip of it now, for no other reason than to give you proof positive that there is nothing tiny about South African music-making.

Hey, something which I find utterly enchanting about South African music-making is that it's so free. You know, South Africans just make music really freely, and I think in no small way that's due to one fundamental fact: they don't read music; they trust their ears. You can teach a bunch of South Africans a tune in about five seconds flat, and then it's as if by magic they will spontaneously improvise a load of harmony around that tune because they can.

Now, those of us that live in the West, if I can use that term, I think have a much more hidebound attitude, or sense of music—that somehow, it's all about skill and systems. Therefore, it's the exclusive preserve of an elite, talented body. Yet, ladies and gentlemen, every single one of us on this planet probably engages with music on a daily basis.

If I can broaden this out for a second, I'm willing to bet that every single one of you sitting in this room would be happy to speak with acuity and with total confidence about movies—probably about literature. But how many of you would be able to make a confident assertion about a piece of classical music? Why is this? What I want to say to you now is I’m just urging you to kind of get over this supreme lack of self-confidence, to take the plunge, to believe that you can trust your ears— you can hear some of the fundamental muscle tissue, fiber, DNA, what makes a great piece of music great.

I've got a little experiment that I want to try with you. Did you know that Ted is a tune—a very simple tune based on three notes: te, D? Now, hang on a minute— I know you're gonna say to me, "t" doesn't exist in music. Well, ladies and gentlemen, there's a time-honored system which composers have been using for hundreds of years which proves, actually, that it does.

If I sing you a musical scale: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and I just carry on with the next set of letters in the alphabet—same scale: H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T—there you got "TC." It's the same as "F" in music. So "T" is "F," so "T E D" is the same as "F E D." Now, that piece of music that we played at the start of this session had enshrined at its heart the theme, which is "Ted."

Have you listened? Do you hear it? Or do I smell some doubt in the room? Okay, we'll play it for you again now, and we're gonna highlight—we're gonna poke out the "T E D," okay, if you pardon the expression. Oh my goodness me, there it was loud and clear! Shirley, I think we should make this even more explicit. They've done. It's nearly time for tea.

What do you reckon? You need to sing for your tea? I think we need to sing for our tea. We're going to sing those three wonderful notes: T E D. Would never go for me! Yeah, you sound a bit more like cows really than human beings. So we'll try that one again.

And look, if you're adventurous, you got the art of "T D" once more with them—there I am like a bloody windmill again. You see? Now we're gonna put that in the context of the music. Okay, the music will start, and then, at a signal from me, you will sing that. I think it wasn't a bad debut for the "Ted" choir—not a bad debut at all.

Now, there's a project that I'm initiating at the moment that I'm very excited about. I wanted to share with you because it is all about changing perceptions and indeed building a new level of trust. The youngest of my children was born with cerebral palsy, which is, you can imagine—if you don't have an experience of it yourself—is quite a big thing to take on board. But the great gift that my gorgeous daughter has given me, aside from her very existence, is that it's opened my eyes to a whole stretch of the community that was hidden to—hidden—the community of disabled people.

And I started looking at the Paralympics and thinking how incredible how technology has been harnessed to prove beyond doubt that disability is no barrier to the highest levels of sporting achievement. Of course, there's a grimmer side to that truth, which is that it's actually taken decades for the world at large to come to a position of trust—to really believe that disability and sports can go together in a convincing and interesting fashion.

So I find myself asking: where is music in all of this? You can't tell me that there aren't millions of disabled people in the UK alone with massive musical potential. So, I decided to create a platform for that potential. It's going to be Britain's first-ever national disabled orchestra; it's called "Para Orchestra." I want to show you a clip now of the very first improvisation session that we had—it was a really extraordinary moment. Just me and four astonishingly gifted disabled musicians.

Normally, when you improvise, at all the time around the world, there's this initial period of kind of horror, like everyone's too frightened to throw their hat into the ring—an awful pregnant silence. Then suddenly, as if by magic, bang, they're all in there. It's complete bedlam. You can't hear anything. No one's listening; no one's trusting; no one's kind of responding to each other.

Now, in this room with these four disabled musicians, within five minutes there was a rapt listening, a rapt response, and some really insanely beautiful music. My name is Nicolas McAfee. I'm 22, and I'm a left-handed pianist. I was born without my left hand.

Right, hand—I do that one again. When I'm making music, I feel like a pilot in the carpet flying airplanes. I become alive. I would rather be able to play an instrument again than walk. There's so much joy and things I could get from playing an instrument and performing. Yeah, it's removed some of the paralysis.

I only wish that some of those musicians were here with us today so you could see it firsthand—how utterly extraordinary they are. "Para Orchestra" is the name of that project. If any of you think you want to help me in any way to achieve what is a fairly impossible, implausible dream still at this point, please let me know.

Now, a parting shot comes courtesy of the great Joseph Haydn, a wonderful Austrian composer of the second half of the 18th century. He spent the bulk of his life in the employ of Prince Nikolaos Esterházy along with his orchestra. Now, this prince loved his music; he also loved the country castle that he tended to reside in most of the time, which was just on the Austro-Hungarian border, a place called Esterházy—a long way from the big city of Vienna.

One day, early in 1772, the prince decreed that the musicians' families, the orchestral musicians' families, were no longer welcome in the castle. They were not allowed to stay there anymore—they had to be returned to Vienna. As I say, an unfeasibly long way away in those days. You can imagine the musicians were disconsolate. Haydn demonstrated with the prince, but to no avail.

So, given the prince loved his music, Haydn thought he'd write a symphony to make the point. I'm going to play just a very tail end of this symphony now, and you'll see the orchestra in a kind of sullen revolt. Please, let's say the prince did take the tip from the orchestral performance. The musicians were reunited with their families, but I think it sums up my talk rather well: that where there is trust, there is music; by extension, life. Where there is no trust, the music quite simply withers away.