Bruce Duffie:    Do you manage to get to the U.S. often?

Malcolm Arnold:    I haven’t been for some time.  Last time I was in the States, I was in Los Angeles, but New York is a favorite city of mine.

BD:    Why is that?

MA:    Well, you’ve got everything!  You’ve got Chinatown, you’ve got Italy, you’ve got German quarter — you’ve got everything.  I always used to call it a microcosm of the whole world; every nationality, race, and creed.

BD:    So you like a generous mixture of all kinds of things?

MA:    That’s right.  And the food is unbelievable!  When I used to come over, people would say, “How did you find the food?  How did you find the food?”  And I used to say, “It’s absolutely marvelous!”

BD:    I assume you like the diversity?

MA:    That’s right.

BD:    Let me ask you this, then:  do you put that same kind of diversity into the music that you write?

MA:    Yeah.  When I’m here, there’s an influence of New York.  I like big cities, you see.  It’s not an original remark, but somebody said you can lose yourself in a big city.

BD:    So my question now is: do you put that same diversity into the music that you write?

MA:    I try to, in everything I write. Yeah, I try to, because is an expression of one’s own individuality; it can’t be more than that.

BD:    And you don’t try to make it more than it is?

MA:    Oh, no, you can’t!  You are what you are, whatever anybody says!  That’s right, isn’t it?

BD:    Well, of course, of course. [Both laugh]  You’ve spent many years writing music that is quite tonal, and quite palatable.  Is this music that you wanted to write?

MA:    Yeah.  When I was twelve and thirteen, all the British composers and a lot of the Americans were writing serial, atonic music, and I knew that wasn’t going to stay.  I have the greatest admiration for Schoenberg, Webern, and particularly Berg, who did a great deal to enhance our musical language.  But I used to say to a man who studied Webern, — a very great friend of mine, Humphrey Searle — “You sing me a tune from Schoenberg!”  And the strange thing was, he had such a perceptive ear and admired the man so much, he could!  Of course, there are tunes if you take the trouble to pick them out.  But who the hell has got that time?  That’s my theory.  I’m not criticizing composers who do that sort of work, because I’ve done experimental works myself in the business of growing up.

BD:    Are you saying that your music takes less effort to enjoy?

MA:    I always hope that.

BD:    I see, so you’re really conscious of the public as you’re sitting there with your pen?

MA:    Oh, yeah!  You always have to think of an audience, always.

BD:    Do you have any special expectations of the audience that will hear your music?

MA:    I hope to, yes.  We had a full house last night, and I’m still recovering from that success.  Don’t think I’m big-headed, [laughs] but it was a fantastic success, the whole program.

BD:    Was yours the only new piece on the program?

MA:    Mine was the only commissioned work, and Michala Petri very generously played the second and fourth movement again as an encore.  She got a round of applause and she did an encore!  I had told her, “If you play that correctly, you’ll get an encore.”  She said, “Do you think so?  I’m much too nervous after I played that in front of you to do an encore.”  She did three! [Both laugh] Two of my movements and a piece that her father told her she should always play to end a concert, because it was a final encore and nothing could follow it.  [See my interview with Michala Petri.]

BD:    What was that piece?

MA:    She says it in Danish.  I can’t translate; I don’t speak Danski, but Michala announces it in her own inimitable way.  “As a final encore I will play this,” and it

s a lovely piece!  It’s a great encore piece, and I think it was possibly arranged, or written for her, by her father.  I’ve never delved into it, but I think it’s true.

BD:    Is it an arrangement of a folk song?

MA:    Yeah.  It’s an arrangement of a Danski folk song.

BD:    And she also played two of your movements?

MA:    There are five movements.  She played the second and fourth.

BD:    Is it good to take a little piece out of a larger work just to play as a gem?

MA:    Well, it’s her work.  She asked me to write it, and as far as I’m concerned, she is the most perfect recorder player I’ve ever heard in my life.  I was amazed she played one movement, let alone two.  But she played these two, and I think it was delightful!

BD:    Would you rather she had played the whole work, so that the people could hear once again the entire structure?

MA:    I asked her why she didn’t do that and she said she was too tired and too nervous.  So it was a great compliment she played only two!  I don’t really approve of people playing snippets of five or three movement works.  To do the last movement of a symphony, or something like that, to give a big finish, I think is in terrible taste.  I know they do it in the States.  The programs are very intelligent, usually:  a concerto, not even an overture, interval, and a symphony.  Sometimes there is an overture, but in the U.K. our programs are much too long!  I’ve always appreciated, particularly in New York, the brevity of the programs.

BD:    You don’t feel the public is getting cheated, and should get more for their money?

MA:    Oh, no!  No, it

s very terrifying for the players, but there is a very good American string quartet who played the Tchaikovsky, and it sounded absolutely magnificent in that hall!  It was terrifying for them, because it’s one of those halls where every squeak or string note can be heard — which is good, you see!

BD:    You could hear all the details?

MA:    All the details, absolutely!  What could be better for a chamber music hall?  It was a great honor to be asked by the United States to be a representative of their opening.

BD:    Does it surprise you that you are a composer of international reputation?

MA:    Not really, no! [Laughs] I think I’m mostly known by my symphonies which have been performed all over the world. . . some of them, not the later ones.  And the chamber music — some of it has been performed and recorded.  But it’s nice to know.  You encourage me, you see.  I should be very a swollen-headed British person in the United States if you talk to me like that, because it’s very, very complimentary to what I feel.  A composer is as young as he feels.  And at seventy, really, you feel as though you’re ready to start!

BD:    Are there any big surprises now that you’re about to approach your seventieth birthday?

MA:    Oh, yeah.  Lots of wonderful things are in store.  Right now, as you know, I

BD:    I assume that you are literally swamped with commissions and offers, and requests for music.  How do you decide which ones you will accept and which ones you will postpone or turn aside?

MA:    In the past I used to have too many commissions, far too many commissions.  But I was little paid.  I used to earn living from films.  I’m the oldest film fan ever.  I started going to films when I was three, and I’m the oldest film fan probably around!  [Both laugh]  I used to call myself Ye Olde Filme Fanne, you know the way they say it in Elizabethan tea rooms.  So when I write music for the cinema, it’s a thing I didn’t just do for money!  I did it because I had so many ideas, naturally, from my senior film composers, Oscar winners, and all that.  I had so many ideas that I wanted to put in practice, that I continually advanced on the backs of my predecessors.  But I hope it was in my own style.

BD:    Was there any major effect upon you of winning the Oscar?

MA:    Well, when I came to New York first, which is when I had won my first Oscar — my only Oscar, I should say — I was swamped!  Even at Customs, people met me.  I was on the Steve Allen Show many years ago. 

BD:    Do you still continue to write the film scores?

MA:    No.  I gave up writing film scores seventeen years ago.

BD:    Purposely?

MA:    Yes, because I thought I was reproducing; I was plagiarizing myself which you can if you do too many films.  You get into a habit of using the same chord progressions, the same tonal progressions, and you never get any further tonally, or anything else.

BD:    Perhaps now that you’ve been away from it for nearly a score of years, might you go back to it?

MA:    Years ago I used to say, “I want to see the script first,” and I would be bombarded with scripts.  I can read a script in about a day.  I used to say to my assistant, “Who is it?” and she’d tell me.  I’d always worked for Anatole Litvak, Mark Roberson, and my dear friend Alfred Newman at Fox, and Darryl F. Zanuck, who was my greatest friend in films.  I always did everything for him, regardless.  One of the best scores I did was for him, Island in the Sun, a magnificent story by the brother of Evelyn Waugh, Alec Waugh.  It had a wonderful cast:  Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte and James Mason.

BD:    When you were writing the score for that or any other film, did you get involved with the picture?

MA:    Oh, I was very much involved with that because it was the first time I had a steel band, a Trinidad steel band.  Guess where?  It was in Archway, Highgate, London!  A Trinidad steel band.  I recorded all that steel band music in London.  They came over and made a day of it.  They used to bring their sandwiches and I’d rehearse with them in their club!  It was a great day out for them.  For me it was an education because they made their own instruments out of tin dustbin lids!  I’d try to figure out how they played with such virtuosity, and they couldn’t tell me how they did it.  They played this with amazing virtuosity!  I mean, it’s absolutely astounding!

BD:    It just evolves for them?

MA:    Well, it’s traditional Trinidadian music, isn’t it, the steel band?  I don’t think they have it anywhere else except in Trinidad.

BD:    I don’t know of it anywhere else.  Of course, with the recordings and the films it would travel all over the world.

MA:    Oh, yes, yes.  That is a great advantage.  There also is a great advantage of the very excellent telephone service you have in the U.S.A., which is cross-country, and very, very fine.

BD:    You and I are talking, even though we’re a thousand miles apart!

MA:    That’s right!  [Both laugh]

BD:    Do you feel that the music you write is for everyone?

MA:    I hope so.  I hope so.  Certain works — the two string quartets — are for a limited public, but all the concert music is meant for the largest possible audience that can be had.  I say always, when I write music, the loneliest thing is to sit at a desk with a piece of manuscript paper in front of you, and no thought of an audience.  I’m always being asked this by young people,

BD:    You’ve conducted a number of your works.  Are you the ideal conductor of your music?

MA:    I always like to think so, but when I hear it played or conducted in a way that reflects my feeling and I don’t have the strain of doing it, I’m very pleased.  The other evening in the Festival Hall — no it was the Albert Hall, I think

Malcolm Arnold, Prolific British Composer, Is Dead at 84 By ANNE MIDGETTE Published in the New York Times: September 25, 2006 Sir Malcolm Arnold, one of the best-known British composers of the 20th century, who wrote nine symphonies, composed 132 film scores and won an Oscar for the soundtrack to “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” died Saturday in Norwich, England. He was 84 and lived in Attleborough, near Norwich. Sir Malcolm’s death, confirmed by a spokesman at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, came on the night of the premiere of “The Three Musketeers,” a new ballet based on his music, in Bradford, England. The cause was widely reported as a chest infection. Sir Malcolm had suffered from mild dementia for several years. Sir Malcolm was one of the most popular British composers and was widely referred to as a neglected genius in his waning years, yet his works are seldom played in concert halls. His music is deliberately tonal, melodic and sometimes witty. He wrote it at a remarkable rate: at the height of his powers he composed six film scores a year in addition to other instrumental works, and he was said to have written “The Bridge on the River Kwai” in a matter of days (6 or 10, depending on the source). He is associated with the English musical tradition of Elgar and Holst, yet his brand of tonality was already unfashionable, even bizarrely so, when he was writing it. And today, critical opinion remains divided as to whether his works show lasting genius or simply remarkable facility. His association with supposedly lighter forms of music also rendered him suspect to the classical establishment in his lifetime. His soundtracks included “Hobson’s Choice” (1954), “Inn of the Sixth Happiness” (1958) and “Whistle Down the Wind” (1961), and he reproved himself for turning down “Lawrence of Arabia.” He wrote humorous pieces like “A Grand, Grand Overture,” which featured three vacuum cleaners and a floor polisher, and made gestures unconventional at the time, like working African and West Indian percussion instruments into his Fourth Symphony in sympathetic reaction to the 1958 race riots in the Notting Hill section of London. In 1969 he conducted the Concerto for Group and Orchestra, which Jon Lord wrote for his band, Deep Purple. None of this helped him gain acceptance in the classical mainstream, though as a crossover artist he was ahead of his time. He was also known as a “difficult man,” words that reflected a life of extremes: a diagnosis of schizophrenia in his early 20’s; heavy living, heavy drinking; and mental breakdowns so devastating he was institutionalized several times and had a range of treatments that may or may not have included a lobotomy. Malcolm Arnold was born in Northampton, England. He began studying composition as a child, but his first musical love was the trumpet, which he took up after hearing Louis Armstrong play when he was 12. He played so well that he began appearing with professional orchestras while still a student at the Royal College of Music. He volunteered for military service in 1944 but hated it so much that he shot himself in the foot to get out of it, returning to civilian life and the first trumpet chair of the London Philharmonic. In 1948 he won the Mendelssohn Scholarship, which gave him the impetus to compose full time. He wrote his first symphony in 1949, but the second, from 1953, brought him the most recognition of his serious works. Maintaining a frenetic level of compositional activity for two decades — in addition to the symphonies and film scores, he wrote seven ballets, more than 20 concertos, and a huge range of music for chamber ensembles, chorus, brass band and more — took a toll. Sir Malcolm’s first marriage, to Sheila Nicholson in 1941, foundered in part as a result of the death of an infant daughter; his second, to Isobel Gray in the 1960’s, produced an autistic son and ended with a court order forbidding the increasingly dangerous, and alcoholic, composer to have any contact with wife or child. In the 1970’s and 80’s, there were suicide attempts, hospital stays and a range of treatments and therapies, and his musical output fell to nearly nothing. In 1984, Sir Malcolm was deemed unfit to live alone and placed by court order in the care of Anthony Day, who remained his full-time caregiver and personal assistant for the rest of his life. The Ninth Symphony, finished in 1986, is dedicated to Mr. Day, but Sir Malcolm virtually ceased composing in the 1990’s. He was knighted in 1993. He is survived by his children, Katherine, Robert and Edward. [Obituary from the New York Times]

This interview was recorded on the telephone on March 16, 1991.  Portions were used on WNIB (along with musical examples) later that year and again in 1995.  The transcription was made in 2008 and posted on this website in November of that year. 

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here.

Award-winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001.  His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.