INTERVIEW WITH JOHN JOUBERT

BY

STEPHANUS MULLER

This interview is provided on the express condition that it can only be used for academic purposes with proper acknowledgment of the author and source. Copyright © Stephanus Muller, 2002 http://www.puk.ac.za/music/isam/

Inligtingsentrum vir Information Centre for Suider-Afrikaanse Musiek ISAM Southern African Music Interview with John Joubert at his home in on 12 January 2001

BY STEPHANUS MULLER

Stephanus Muller: You were born in in 1927?

John Joubert: Actually Plumstead, which is, as you know, down the suburban line on the way down to Simon’s Town.

SM: And your parents, what did they do?

JJ: My mother was a piano teacher. She had been trained at the South African College of Music where W.H. Bell was Principal. She was mainly a pianist, but she did a certain amount of acting as well. And she finished her studies in this country under Harriet Cohen, where she became very much enthused by the Russian Ballet because Harriet Cohen was tremendously keen on the Russian Ballet. I am talking of the 1920s now, of course. My mother always had a very keen interest in ballet, particularly the Russian ballet repertoire, so she had quite a collection of recordings and works like Shéhérazade, even an ancient recording of Rite of Spring. So I suppose most of whatever musical talent I have came from her. She was a De Smit. Her forebears came from Holland and settled in the late eighteenth century, I suppose, because her Dutch forebear was actually a naval captain who was fighting the English during the Napoleonic Wars. Holland, as you probably know, was an ally of France. And so he came to the Cape when it was still a Dutch colony as a member of the Dutch navy, but he settled in Cape Town and so that is how her family settled at the Cape. My father’s forebears go back even further than that. They were Huguenots who came to the Cape with the original Huguenots in 1688 and they settled down as you probably know, it’s old South African history. My own particular forebear became a sort of wine grower, I imagine around the Franschoek area, I’m not sure whereabouts it was but that was how it started. He was originally from Provence. My father’s interests were mostly literary, he was a tremendous reader and he was artistic, he was a good draftsman, but he wasn’t in the slightest bit musical. He always used to say that there were two tunes he knew: the one was God Save the King and the other wasn’t. But as far

INFORMATION CENTRE FOR SOUTHERN AFRICAN MUSIC 1 Interview with John Joubert as his professional life was concerned, he made his living working as a clerk in an office in Cape Town and went up to the office every morning on the train from Plumstead. When we eventually went to school, my older brother and I went to rather an expensive private school, in Cape Town, paid for, I think, by relatives. I don’t think my father would have been able to pay for both my brother and I to go to school there. But very, very fortunately in my particular case (well I think in both our cases), we were able to go into first the Preparatory School and to the Senior School and get our education there. I say “fortunately for me”, because it was a school with a very good musical tradition and the music master who was there at the time was very much connected with the Anglican choral festival Three -tradition of this country. So I got my first taste of British choral music really through him. And of course like many sort of Cape Afrikaner families we were English-speaking. When the Cape became an English colony, our respective families I suppose simply adopted English as their primary language and continued as sort of honorary English people. This is the whole complexity of the colonial situation, of course. Through family background I became familiar with reading English books, reading English periodicals and so on and as far as my school background is concerned, again it was a very “English style,” I suppose you could say, upbringing. That situation really continued until I left the Diocesan College in 1944.

SM: Were you only two children, the two boys?

JJ: We were three. My older brother, myself and my younger sister.

SM: Where is your sister now?

JJ: She is still living in England. She went to Rhodes University and graduated there.

SM: You finished your school career in 1944 and in 1946 you came to England. How did that come about?

JJ: When I left school, I was already very keen on the idea of becoming a . That had all started while I was at school and through my mother knowing W.H. Bell I had composition lessons from him, as indeed did Hubert du Plessis and Stefans Grové. We were all pupils of his round

INFORMATION CENTRE FOR SOUTHERN AFRICAN MUSIC 2 Interview with John Joubert about the same time. He was a marvellously inspiring teacher. But my big ambition was to, if possible, come to Europe and I suppose for me Europe meant England as that was the cultural tradition I was brought up in. But we hadn’t the means of course, my parents hadn’t the means to send me to England. So from school I went to the South African College of Music for a period, initially to study for a degree there. But I became aware that there was a scholarship which was run by the Performing Rights Society and it was open to competition for two years’ study in England. So I thought I would put in for that. It was competitive, as I say, and my only chance really for getting abroad. But there was a problem at the time because various people applied for it, senior to me, and the committee could not actually make up its mind — it was 50/50 divided — as to whom to award the scholarship to. So they decided to give the casting vote to the newly appointed head of the College of Music, who was Dr Eric Chisholm, who arrived early in 1946 directly from his war service and the matter was turned over to him and he decided that the scholarship should be awarded to me. So I really owe the fact that I’m here to him, in fact. So that was rather providential, because I doubt if I would have had another chance of coming to this country.

SM: Who was your opposition for the scholarship?

JJ: Well, Hubert was in for it and I think would undoubtedly have got it but actually didn’t want to come so soon. He did subsequently get it and came later during the early 50s. I think he was already involved in a job and felt that he had to stick with it for a time. Stefans Grové, I’m not sure whether he actually went in for it. I know he went to America and I think he got another award for getting to the States. I think in fact he didn’t go in for it. That may have been, I can only speculate, I just don’t know, may have been a political thing about coming to England. He never has been to England, as far as I know. Not for any length of time anyway. He went to the States eventually and stayed there for a considerable time. As I say, Hubert at the time didn’t want to come and went in for it later. Who the other opposition was, I don’t know. Blanche Gerstman came. She came later and I’m not sure whether the scholarship still exists. Of course Arnold [van Wyk] was the first holder of it. He came in 1938-39, thereabouts.

SM: Before we move on, you mentioned W.H. Bell and said that he was a tremendously inspiring teacher. Would you like to elaborate on that? You talked once before about him and said that you thought that perhaps too little credit was given to him as a kind of founding father of South African composition. He taught nearly all those first generation , including Arnold?

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JJ: No, he never taught Arnold. He offered to, but Arnold for some reason or another felt reluctant to accept his offer. I don’t know if you’ve seen that collection of letters that Hubert published. It is an extremely interesting volume and it gives the story there about how Arnold felt about taking lessons with Bell. I’ll see if I can find it later on, but it’s quite an interesting piece of South African history.

SM: Was it because he wouldn’t accept lessons for free, or was it because Bell would have had a very English oriented approach?

JJ: I don’t think Arnold would have objected to that. I think partly he was reluctant to accept lessons for free. He may also have felt out of step with Bell’s compositional style at that time, because Bell was of course already retired by that time and I suppose belonged to a previous generation of composers. Maybe he felt that his approach would not be, I don’t know, up to date enough, I’m not sure. I can’t remember the actual reason, but I’ll try and find the passage for you in the letters. I think the thing about Bell was that he was part of the English musical renaissance of the early part of this [the twentieth] century. He went out to South Africa originally in 1912 by which time he was already quite a well-known name in this country. And he had compositions performed by all the main conductors in all the main venues here and was well established here. He was really, you know, really quite well known. And there’s a bit of a revival of interest in him now. There is an article in the current British Society Newsletter about his . At that time he was a god- send to me because he was the only person around senior enough and with enough experience — I mean he was a professional composer — to have given me the kind of technical expertise or to relate some of his own expertise and experience. He was a great enthusiast and would get excited about things. He was a very good teacher from that point of view.

SM: You say that Bell was retired, that he was an old man and perhaps he was not a man of his time with regard to his compositional approach or ideas. Did he perhaps instill in you a liking for neo-classical, neo-romantic idioms which would later lead to your rather averse attitude to something like serialism? Would that be a lasting kind of influence?

JJ: Well of course, when I went to him I was unaware of serialism (as was he, probably!) It might be, yes, I’m not sure about that because he did have very strong views about certain composers. He was very independently minded — he didn’t like the English folk song school, you know, Vaughn

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Williams, etc. He belonged very much to the more romantic English tradition, people like Arnold Bax and to a certain extent, I suppose, Delius. But yes, I don’t think that his prejudices influenced me because I subsequently became very fond of composers he criticized very strongly when we were having our lessons.

SM: Shostakovich, Stravinsky?

JJ: Well, there again, he was a tremendously keen Wagnerian, of course, and although I went off Wagner for quite a long time, I subsequently became a very keen Wagnerian and remain so. But he thought that Wagner was the greatest thing that ever happened in music just about, because his own teacher at the Academy, Frederick Korda, was a very keen Wagnerian and in fact had done the English translations of the Wagner operas for their first English editions. So all that sort of ripe, late-romantic German tradition — Wagner, Strauss and so on, or in its English equivalent Arnold Bax — that was all part of Bell’s background. He was certainly not an English pastoralist or folk- song person. I mean, I think he did have an effect, obviously, on my development. But after all, my upbringing was extremely provincial and isolated in Cape Town. I wasn’t really aware what had been going on in Europe. By the time I left Cape Town I had hardly heard anything. I think I had heard one or two Mahler pieces. Very little Stravinsky, apart from the early ballets. Virtually no Schoenberg, Webern, Berg. These I all discovered later when I came over to this country. They were not all that easy to hear even then, even here! Though one did hear them on the Third Programme, which just got started when I got here in 1946, which was a tremendous, tremendous stimulus of course. Because you couldn’t buy records, it was very difficult to buy records of this music.

SM: We’ve reached 1946 when you came over to England. Where did you live? You went to London to study at the Royal Academy?

JJ: The Royal Academy, yes.

SM: Where did you live?

JJ: Well, I lived in a suburb of Mill Hill, which is North London. It was some distance away, but I had very good lodgings there. It was quite a long bus ride from central London or occasionally to journey from Edgeware, but it was quite good to get out of the centre of London. I quite liked it. But then, of course, the public transport and traffic situation was very much easier then than it is

INFORMATION CENTRE FOR SOUTHERN AFRICAN MUSIC 5 Interview with John Joubert now. I remained there for my first three years. My scholarship was actually extended for another two years so I had four years of scholarship, so the scholarship lasted me up till 1950.

SM: And you took composition lessons with whom?

JJ: Well, I started off with Theodor Holland. I was with him for a year. And then I went to Howard Ferguson and I remained with Ferguson till the end of my time at the Academy, with a gap of one term with Allan Bush (who was a very good sort of counterblast to Howard). His approach was completely different and I found him very, very stimulating.

SM: And during that time you won the Novello prize?

JJ: That was soon after I left the Academy, it was early fifties. But while I was at the Academy I won various prizes. The Lionel Curtiss prize for the , the Fauré Prize for a choral work and the Royal Philharmonic Society Prize for an orchestral work. These were all competitions which were held within the Academy. In fact the money I was awarded for these prizes was actually quite a help to keep me going financially. The scholarship was only about £250 pounds a year, so one had to be fairly careful about money.

SM: When you finished your studies at the Royal Academy, did you consciously decide to remain in England or did you just find a job and consequently stayed?

JJ: Yes, it was a bit of both really. I mean, there seemed to be … things were beginning to sort of open up in the early 1950s. One had the feeling that things were getting going again after the war. People often nowadays speak of the 1950s as a period of terrible sort of drabness and austerity and so on. I didn’t feel that at all. I felt that it was a kind of wonderful Golden Age. There were new universities springing up, new concert halls springing up, new cultural ventures of one kind or another starting up, restarting. I thought it was a very exciting period. There was that and one was … after four years I was beginning to get used to things and I got to know a few people and finding my way around, getting slightly known too. I just thought, well, nobody was offering me any employment from South Africa, though I probably would have been able to get something had I gone back. So there is nothing luring me back and I thought I might as well stick around and see what’s going. But it was very necessary to get some sort of employment because, you know, money was very, very tight indeed. I looked around for various jobs and tried to make contacts in the film world. I thought there would be money in writing film music. And then there were educational jobs

INFORMATION CENTRE FOR SOUTHERN AFRICAN MUSIC 6 Interview with John Joubert going and I applied for a job at what was then known as the University College of Hull, which was starting up. Well, it had just started up a music department and they wanted another lecturer. There was already a Director of Music and they wanted another lecturer. And I had got my external B.Mus. from by this time. I studied on my own for the degree from Durham University, the external B.Mus. and had got it by this time. I thought: armed with this, I will see what I can do. I went into the Hull post. I mean, I had great doubts and conflicts about doing this, because I still wasn’t certain that I wanted to spend the rest of my life here and going to a small sort of fishing sea-port town on the North Sea after being brought up in the Western Cape and spending four years in London was not exactly a very alluring prospect. I remember on the train journey up to Hull I had to change at Doncaster and it was absolutely pouring with rain. I very nearly got on the train back to London there and then and never turned up for the interview. But I did go on for the interview in the end. And maybe because I was doubtful whether I wanted the job, you know, this sort of situation where one doesn’t care and one does consequently rather better. It was a good thing I didn’t care too much, perhaps. But anyway, I did get it, but then of course the whole process started of what a university lecturer is supposed to do, because I mean I had no university experience. I mean, my own training had been at a conservatoire, and although I had sort of studied on my own for this external degree, I hadn’t attended a university as a student since my early UCT days in ‘45. And so I had to sort of do some very quick thinking and sort of learn on the job as I went along. Very difficult, because of course, there were not many resources in those days. Very little teaching material, not many books, certainly not many recordings. I remember I depended very heavily on the local public library, which had a very good music section. And so I spent a lot of time really educating myself in order to keep up with my students, when I first began.

SM: What did you teach?

JJ: At that time we taught for the external London B.Mus. degree. Because we were really simply a college. We were rather like places like Southampton and Leicester — they were all in the same boat. And they very soon got their charters and became universities in their own right. All this was post-war development of which one felt a part. So within a couple of years we were running our own show, training for our own degrees. And this went on until 1962; I was there for twelve years altogether. And I learnt a lot of other things, a lot of new music, and I had a choir which I conducted and so … the Director of Music there was very, very interesting. He had been at Cambridge and he was a most remarkable person. He had both a classics degree and a music degree from Cambridge.

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He was a brilliant person. He’d been working on … I don’t know if you’d heard of Bletchley Park, the decoding establishment …?

SM: Yes, it was in the news recently because of the stolen decoder.

JJ: Yes, exactly, the Enigma. But he was all part of that. A very, very brilliant person and it was quite an education just to be a colleague of his. And so, you know, one learnt and I got fond of the place and I made quite a few friends there. But inevitably, of course, by that time — we were married in 1951 and started a family in 1954 — and so one began to put down roots. And so, you know, I suppose, this is how one has sort of remained in this country. Not through any conscious decision but just the way things turned out, really. A lot had sheer chance attached to it.

SM: Your wife’s name is … ?

JJ: Mary.

SM: So you married in 1951 and you finished your studies in London in 1950. I suppose you met in London?

JJ: We met at the Academy.

SM: And she followed you to Hull?

JJ: Yes, well, she originally first of all had a teaching post herself in Wales and moved over to Hull when we got married and taught for a time there.

SM: Is she a musician too?

JJ: She is, yes, she’s a pianist, yes.

SM: With whom did she study at the Academy?

JJ: Oh, she studied with York Bowen, who was also a composer.

SM: You married in 1951 and in 1954 you had your first child?

JJ: Yes, yes.

SM: All your children are also musicians, are they?

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JJ: Both, yes. We have a son and daughter. Pierre is a violinist and Anna is a cellist.

SM: Pierre was born in 1954, and Anna?

JJ: Fifty seven.

SM: And Pierre’s name goes back to the Huguenot line?

JJ: Yes, yes. Well, Pierre Joubert was the first Huguenot in South Africa in 1698. And the Anna of course is partly Anna Karenina, though I hope she doesn’t come to such a sticky end as she!

SM: Do they make a living from their music, or are they both amateur musicians?

JJ: No, no. They’re both professional musicians. Pierre makes a living from his violin playing. Well, Anna does freelance engagements, but she has her own family. Well, so has Pierre.

SM: Does it please you that they’re both musicians?

JJ: Yes, yes it does.

SM: After Hull, that would be 1962, you came to Birmingham as a Reader of Music?

JJ: Well I was appointed Reader some time after I came to Birmingham. I can’t remember what year it was exactly — 1967 possibly. I was appointed Reader, which is a kind of honorary title, which doesn’t carry with it any more money. It is, you know, quite a nice thing to have as a kind of recognition, I suppose. Because by that time of course I had had a lot of works performed and published and broadcast and these counted towards my academic status.

SM: You remained at the university till 1986?

JJ: Eighty six, yes, when I retired, yes, yes. I went part-time in 1983 and when I was part-time for three years, I eventually took early retirement completely in 1986.

SM: Did you want to compose more?

JJ: Yes, I did. I felt the pressure of both academic work and fulfilling commissions was beginning to get a bit much. And

INFORMATION CENTRE FOR SOUTHERN AFRICAN MUSIC 9 Interview with John Joubert universities were encouraging people to take early retirement as an economic measure. You know, it was very much a part of the economic policy of the time to re-engage people on a part-time basis rather than employ them full-time. It was very much a part of the Mrs. Thatcher economic policy. Not that I agreed with the policy, but nevertheless I was a beneficiary of it. So I became for the first time a full-time composer, which of course was what I’d always wanted to be. I’d never, in my wildest dreams, thought of becoming an academic. That wasn’t part of my plan at all. But I did so almost by accident, in a sense, because it was sheer necessity to earn enough money to keep alive and keep a family.

SM: Did you like Mrs. Thatcher? What was your reaction to Thatcherism?

JJ: No, I didn’t. No, I intensely disliked Mrs. Thatcher. I still do. Everything she stood for, her whole legacy has been totally disastrous for this country. And the whole ethos of monetarism as such, which I think has been a disaster for the whole world, because of course it is a world economic policy now. Every capitalist democracy has to live by monetarism for some reason or another. It’s a kind of theory, isn’t it, a kind of economic theory. No, I think it’s been a disaster.

SM: Do you think it is an inherently unjust theory?

JJ: Well, I think to run anything on the basis of a theory is a bad thing. It’s part of my dislike of serialism. You know, it’s a kind of slavery to a concept. This is something I dislike, especially if one doesn’t agree with the premise of the concept, which in monetarism means that money is the measure of all things. And in serialism, you know, the premise is there is no such thing as tonality, which is a principle of science and music. I think these are tyrannies which one could well do without.

SM: Do you think it’s a bogus dyad to talk about communism’s claims of being a non-monetarism theory or idea and the capitalist monetarist ideas which we have now inherited at the end of the Cold War? Do you think that was a bogus kind of opposition and do you think there is a real alternative to what we have at the moment?

JJ: They may not be. I’m not a political thinker. I’m a hopelessly unrealistic idealist. I’m a sort of Don Quixote. And I feel that capitalism and communism, which are so often opposed to each other, have a lot in common. They have a tendency to arrive at the same point by different routes. I think

INFORMATION CENTRE FOR SOUTHERN AFRICAN MUSIC 10 Interview with John Joubert the adoption of capitalist economics by Russia and Eastern Europe has lead to the most disastrous results. So is one ruled by commissars or the mafia? It’s one or the other, it seems.

SM: What do you think are the implications of an all-pervading monetarism for the arts, especially the art you practice? Do you think it changes the aesthetic idea of art?

JJ: Well, I think it’s been disastrous for … I’m really a sort of Old Labour rather than New Labour, if you see what I mean. I feel the Old Labour government which built the Festival Hall, which started the Arts Council, was inevitably more benevolent towards the duties of a civilized state towards culture and the arts. But I feel New Labour has adopted a lot of the principles of monetarism and, consequently, the financing of the arts has all got to be justified by profitability and populism and all the rest of it. So, I think the Old Labour ideas about these things were more humane, more civilized.

SM: Do you think this is a particularly dark period for the arts?

JJ: I do, really. Yes, yes, I do. Whether this is a result of the imposition of political theory or not, I just don’t know. I think monetarism has not really been a very good thing for the arts. I think there have been a lot of other factors about it too. I think the Cold War was an immensely damaging thing for culture and I think the power of media, for instance in Western capitalist society, has become altogether too much. I don’t think that’s been a good thing either, for culture.

SM: You say you dislike theory in general and banded together communist ideas and capitalist ideas with something like serialism. And then you said that you’re an idealist. You don’t think one man’s theory is another man’s idealism?

JJ: [Laughs] That’s another sort of slavery?

SM: I was surprised to hear you say that, because I thought if you dislike the idea of theory or regulating practice, you’d be wary of ideals, you’d be a pragmatist.

JJ: Oh well, yes, perhaps that’s what I am. But “pragmatist” suggests a kind of practical grasp which I don’t possess [laughs]. It sounds as if I feel I can sort of take over, but I couldn’t possibly be able to.

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SM: You say you’re an idealist and you also said you are much more Old Labour in your view of how society should look and function …

JJ: Yes.

SM: What would your ideals be for a society like the one you live in? Would it be a non-capitalist ideal?

JJ: Well, I think my ideal in England, again, will probably never happen. Which is what I mean by being an idealist. I think that the things that I would like to see, I certainly will not live to see them, may never happen. What I would like to see for this country is first of all the splitting up of the Union. I think Scotland should be independent, I think Wales and Northern Ireland should be independent states within the European Union. I think England ought to be an independent state. I think they should get rid of all this awful monarchy business — the whole establishment apparatus of heredity peers, of Houses of Lords, titles. Hereditary privilege I don’t think is really a very good thing. These are anachronisms which are really holding this country back. This is why I think it is tremendously important for this country to be part of Europe and to begin to think of itself as part of Europe. It’s hardly begun. All this opposition to the Euro is nonsense. What is sacred about the pound? I think this country has just got to grasp the idea that it is part of Europe — not a sort of satellite of America — and try and work towards devolution. Complete devolution, not the sort of fudge we’ve got at the moment in Scotland and the even bigger fudge in Wales. And somehow get rid of all this establishment apparatus which is antiquated, anachronistic. We still live in a society that is so based on deference to privilege, privilege of one kind or another. This is why I feel … these things probably will never happen. I do wish they could.

SM: Never say never. I mean you must have thought …

JJ: One must have thought these things about South Africa!

SM: Exactly what I was going to say.

JJ: You would have thought they would never happen, but they have happened. Yes, never say never. Yes, quite right, you’ve given me good advice!

SM: What has it done for you, what happened in South Africa in 1994? You obviously didn’t think, along with the rest of the world, that it would happen?

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JJ: No, I didn’t. Although I did visit South Africa in 1993 and it was obvious something was going to happen.

SM: Yes, the first election was coming, but the initial watershed, De Klerk’s speech in 1990, came as a shock?

JJ: I wouldn’t say it came as a shock. One did feel for the first time that things were moving in the right direction. Whereas, of course, from 1947 … was it ’47 or ’48?

SM: ’48.

JJ: … one felt that they were pushed in the wrong direction.

SM: How was it like as a white South African living in England during those years, which were very, very difficult years for South Africa? I mean, white South Africans, I think, were ostracized to quite a large degree for what were unacceptable internal policies. Did you experience any of that?

JJ: Yes, yes, possibly. Although it was very difficult for me to determine whether the … it was difficult to sort out if it was ostracism on a political basis or ostracism of a kind of inertia, you know, “out of sight out of mind” sort of thing because I was six thousand miles away living in another country. Maybe I was just being forgotten about. I think maybe there was a political basis behind it as well.

SM: Was it difficult as a white South African living here? Were public attitudes in England towards South Africa very antagonistic? Did you experience difficult situations as a white South African?

JJ: Well, not really, because first of all I suppose having been brought up as an Anglophone Afrikaner and having been to an English school at the Cape one could in sense pass as English. I mean, I’m really a product of a colonial situation. I am myself a kind of survivor … I mean, I don’t suppose there are many true colonials left any more. Good thing too. But you know, I’m a product of a sort of artificial situation and I pass as English and I suppose if I’d stayed in South Africa and polished up my Afrikaans I’d have passed as Afrikaans! One was aware in the country that there was, yes indeed there was antagonism towards the Apartheid regime. But there were of course a lot of people who sympathized as well, a lot of people in this country who were quite pro the regime in South Africa.

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SM: Did you join the Anti-Apartheid Movement and boycotted Outspan oranges?

JJ: No, I never did, because I always felt very torn about this because I felt that it would be in a way a kind of abuse of the privilege I was enjoying by living in this country to discriminate against my own flesh and blood, who were having to put up with the position on the ground at the very cutting edge in South Africa itself. No, I never did boycott South African goods. I did, in the end, limit, well in fact I actually turned down one or two invitations to visit. Latterly, I mean during the later period. My whole attitude, actually, was a sort of rather gradual evolution, because when I first came to this country I was politically quite naïve. I mean, I suppose if I’d remained there I would have voted for Smuts’ old United Party. But I think I became more aware of the political situation in South Africa by reading English liberal newspapers. So, in a sense one’s — I was quite apolitical when I came over — so in a sense my political education, as indeed most of my other education, really happened here. I suppose it was a slow, late development. I was a late developer, musically as well as in other ways, anyway. So I think the real shock to me, and I can still remember the day, was in fact Sharpeville. Coming down, picking up the morning paper and seeing those pictures on the front page. I think that was a trauma, you know. I think it was a turning point. I suppose I’ve never really lost, despite the fact that I’ve lived here continuously since 1946, I’ve never really lost the sense of also belonging somewhere else. I never lost that. I mean, it’s part of me and always will be, I suppose. If there is anything about South Africa in the newspaper I read it still.

SM: You do a lot of reading. Would you say that is one of the bigger influences on your artistic development? Literary influences?

JJ: Yes, I would say, almost, I mean apart from the music itself, it is the biggest influence, yes.

SM: How does that work, I mean how does literature feed into music when you’re a composer? The obvious examples would be operatic texts or oratorio texts. Does it also happen with regard to compositions that have no words attached to them?

JJ: Not, entirely, though although in works … I mean one can write purely instrumental works which are based on literature. An example of that is pieces I wrote fairly recently on Gilbert’s dairies. I don’t know whether you know the diaries of the Rev. Francis Gilbert. He was a Victorian curate in Wales. He wrote these wonderful diaries. I came across them in an edition by William Plomer, who was of course Benjamin Britten’s librettist for his later operas — the Church Parables

INFORMATION CENTRE FOR SOUTHERN AFRICAN MUSIC 14 Interview with John Joubert in particular — and who of course also has a South African connection. I was already interested in Plomer and I discovered that he’d edited and discovered these diaries, these Victorian clergyman’s diaries, and brought out an edition of them. So there you have a South African connection through Plomer, a musical connection through Britten, a literary connection through Gilbert’s diaries and in fact a geographical connection too, because Gilbert’s diaries are all about the Welsh border country, which I know a little bit of because we have great friends there and we go annually to the music festival at Prestine [unclear], which is also right on the border or just over the border. And I used extracts of his diaries to write a series of pieces for violin and viola, in fact I was asked to do them for the Prestine Festival since Gilbert was local to Prestine. So there you have purely instrumental music actually based on literature and all sorts of other things come into it. But, I mean, obviously the big impact is poetry and drama on opera. But it worked. Like the Second , which was something you’ve been involved with, which was also, I suppose, a work based on a piece of literature by Alan Paton, which really is a result of a frustrated opera, which I had the idea of perhaps adapting it as an opera and found it wasn’t possible for copyright reasons. But a lot of what I felt about reading that got fed into the symphony. The epigraph at the beginning of the score is a quote from that novel. There are a lot of other influences that come into that as well, but literature is certainly a part of that.

SM: In one of our previous discussions you said that you had always wished you had come from one of the Scandinavian countries, somewhere a little bit closer to the hub of things musically. How do you see yourself now? Most of your compositional work was done, of course, in the twentieth century …

JJ: The last century, one must say.

SM: The last century … and you may have many more productive years left in this one, but looking from where you are now, how do you see yourself as a twentieth-century composer? Of what are you a part, where do you fit in, how do you see yourself?

JJ: Well, I think this is very difficult, because this is one of the reasons, as far as I remember, one of the reasons why I said I wish I had been born, I gave the example of a Scandinavian composer — I don’t necessarily want to have been a Norwegian or a … Fin! I think this is part of the feeling of being a colonial and not belonging anywhere. But I really would have thought it nice to be a composer that had been born in a country which had its own folklore, its own folk music, its own

INFORMATION CENTRE FOR SOUTHERN AFRICAN MUSIC 15 Interview with John Joubert language, its own literature and so on, instead of being born neither one thing nor the other, or a bit of both. I think it’s just a reaction against how one feels as a colonial. The great problem for a colonial, as you know, is the sense of identity, and of course one knows that other writers and artists who have been born somewhere outside the centre of the cultural tradition to which they belong, also feel like colonials. I mean, I have been reading letters of V.S. Naipaul. He is doubly colonial in the sense that he is Hindu Indian and was born in Trinidad. Came to this country to study in 1950 at Oxford and his letters home to his father and family are very similar to my own experience arriving in England in 1946. And of course he has lived in England ever since, written English novels about England. Henry James settled in England, wrote English novels about England and English people and particularly, I suppose, about the relation … I mean most of his novels are … the tensions which they embody are the tensions of “where do I belong, America or Europe?” And one feels the same sense of tension. And something like Eliot. You know, people who have been … born in an environment which is different from the centre of the cultural tradition to which they feel they belong, it is not the environment to which they belong, and the rest of their life and work is very much a working out of this tension. It’s kind of working out an identity, not just national identity — personal identity as well.

SM: Yes, that was what I was going to say. This is on a personal level, where do you think your work finds itself? Do you look back at the twentieth century with some sense of satisfaction having seen serialism snuffed out? I mean, the kind of music that you write, I suppose after having gone through a period where it must have been considered very unfashionable, is back in fashion. Where do you see your musical output in terms of twentieth century musical output?

JJ: Well, I think it is difficult now to talk of what is in fashion, because we live in such a pluralistic situation. It is very difficult to say, certainly in the same sense say that you could talk in the 50s and 60s of serialism as being the fashionable thing to be involved with. I can’t think of anything now … I suppose in the art world the whole idea of conceptual art which seems to dominate the whole art scene at the moment is a kind of fashion, a very dominant fashion. But one feels that it’s not the whole story and it’s the same sort of feeling I had when serialism was the thing to do. I had the same view that it wasn’t the whole story. There had to be something else, I couldn’t believe the premise on which the whole thing was based, I couldn’t go along with it, I felt there had to be some other way. If I were an artist now, I would feel the same about conceptualism. And very much the same thing is happening in art, because conceptual art is the only thing that’s talked about, the only

INFORMATION CENTRE FOR SOUTHERN AFRICAN MUSIC 16 Interview with John Joubert thing that gets into the papers. You know, Tracey Emin’s bed and all this sort of thing gets talked about in the papers and people get the idea that this is the only sort of art that is around. Everybody’s doing it. It’s not true. There’s a lot of very good art around that doesn’t get into newspapers.

SM: Do you think it will be possible to go back to a kind of rigid situation where one would again be able to talk of something as “being in fashion”? Do you think it’s irreversibly pluralistic from now on, everything is fragmented into thousands of directions and …

JJ: Well, I think there is a sense … who was that Japanese writer who wrote a book saying that we got to the end of history?

SM: Fukuyama.

JJ: Yes, well you can see what he means. I can’t see how … I can’t see at the moment how things would go back to the situation that obtained up to and including the 60s and 70s. And of course things never do go back. But what they will actually ever go on to I don’t know. But at the moment everything seems to be in a kind of pluralistic situation where there’s a tremendous opportunity for people with enough chutzpah to exploit it. Which is of course where the media come in. Enormous influence and enormous influence over public taste …

SM: Which takes us back to monetarism …

JJ: Yes, in fact, yes. You take the whole moral content out of the situation and you’re in a sort of mish-mash of anarchistic …

SM: I suppose there’s a measure of protection in a society that globalises, that isn’t really controlled. The intense exposure of individualities and pluralism and subjectivities …

JJ: Yes … yes … In many ways it’s not a bad thing, because you’re on your own, you find your way of coping, you find people who think like you do, you find your own circle and you find your own level. And in that sense it’s freer. On the other hand, one is conscious of a vacuum as well. One wants too push against something and now there’s nothing to push against.

SM: That’s a very astute observation.

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JJ: It’s a little bit of one thing and a little bit of another. Nothing’s straightforward, I’m afraid.

SM: One large last question. How would you characterize the century that we have now left behind us?

JJ: In what terms, in cultural terms, political terms, in general?

SM: General.

JJ: Well in many ways it’s been the most horrendous century ever, the most destructive. But also a century of enormous scientific advance on all sorts of fronts. A century of tremendous artistic achievement, despite all the destruction. Great artists, great composers. Many were still alive when I came to England. I could see Richard Strauss conduct, 1947 in London. Many people were still alive: Vaughn-Williams, Stravinsky, Sibelius — a lot of people. In fact, it was a period of tremendous richness. It was a paradox really, I suppose. Period of great destructiveness and a period of great upheaval, great scientific discovery, great artistic … I mean, many of my favourite composers are twentieth-century composers. And I would say the same of art and literature as well. Either twentieth century or survivors into the twentieth century. I mean people like Mahler, Tolstoy, big figures, giants. I think one of the problems, one feels, of the present pluralistic situation, is whether conditions are possible for such giants to emerge. There’s so much to encompass. It was still possible for somebody like Mahler to feel that he was speaking … I mean he was speaking for a relatively small world still in his day. A relatively small Western-European, middle-European cultural ambience, even if he was conducting in New York. And I suppose that situation really went on. It was still very much a Eurocentric cultural world, wasn’t it, whether you were in South Africa or Australia or America. But that’s not quite so true now. And whereas it’s quite possible for one man to have the sort of Eurocentric vision of the world, I don’t think anybody has an eye big enough to comprehend the world as it is now, the whole world, global. I mean, nobody could be that big. That’s the big problem, I think. You’ll get a lot of relatively minor figures cultivating their own patch, but the big patch has got so big, I wonder whether anyone could encompass it any more.

SM: Time Warner AOL?

JJ: Well, there you have rampant monetarism. Monetarism is what has made things like Time Warner possible. It’s a big sort of economic imperialism all over again, only based on money. You could say it was always based on money, but it wasn’t entirely that. I mean, after all you could say,

INFORMATION CENTRE FOR SOUTHERN AFRICAN MUSIC 18 Interview with John Joubert not that I am pro-colonial, but you could say that the British did leave a cultural legacy behind. But what are Time Warner going to leave behind? Just more consumers of Time Warner products. It’s consumerism that’s dominating, isn’t it?

SM: Yes, and I suppose when you see violinists like Vanessa Mae, you wonder about what drives these people to the top. Is it innate talent or is it the possibility of sales that keep them there on top? And I suppose it is the same with serious art, composition. It is as if the system places a kind of question mark over whatever it produces, because you have to start questioning with the involvement of money and profit.

JJ: Yes. It’s a sort of commodification of everything, including music. Put it this way, I don’t think that more and more complete Beethoven sets of complete Beethoven symphonies, more and more CD’s, special offers, is a matter of any sort of cultural importance any more. I think it’s just a kind of way of selling things. It seems to me that, culture, to be alive, must be created. Not just bought and sold. So, in a way, somehow the creative imagination has to continue in some way or another. I’m sure it will survive, but it’s got to survive in a commercialised world.

SM: Thank you very much.

JJ: Yes, we seem to have gone rather philosophical.

SM: Well, that was a big question. When you ask someone what do they think of the last century you expect the answer to plumb the depths.

JJ: Yes, well, of course the last century is a matter of depth, but it has had its heights as well. What I fear for this century is a levelling off, which seems to me not so exciting. I think life will become perhaps more comfortable but less interesting.

SM: More comfortable in some regions. I always think that things are becoming worse and worse in places like Africa, with no real end in sight.

JJ: Yes, yes. What monetarism does is of course to separate the rich from the poor. So it produces two worlds. It’s parasitic.

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