Men Get Used To Anything
I had the idea for this piece after talking to Joy Gregory about my piece Zombification. She pointed out that the touristy superstition about zombies was nothing compared to the real horror of Haiti - which is crippling poverty. The poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere right on the doorstep of the richest, generating enormous suffering. This discussion encouraged me to write a piece based on real horror - no ghosts, no zombies, no superstitions. I was lead directly to the horror of World War I.
I began by doing some research about music around the Great War. In popular culture it was all about songs, mostly with piano accompaniment but often accapella; and the newly developed gramophone. Gramophone players were quite common in the trenches (on both sides) and were deemed good for morale.
In "high" culture there was a decided turn to the mystic. Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society were still enormously influential and new approaches to Christianity and spirituality were becoming commonplace. As war broke out Rudolf Steiner was building his first Goetheanum, Aleister Crowley had just founded his Ordo Templi Orientis, and Russian composer, synaesthesic and mystic Alexander Skriabin was composing using his Mystic Chord - also know as The Prometheus Chord. This six-note chord has a rich, multi directional and even Jazzy quality. Harmonically it shows Oriental influence but is firmly rooted in the tail end of the European romantic tradition.
I decided to base the harmony of Men Get Used To Anything on this chord or mode. I felt a timeless, mystic backdrop to the horror of war would be deeply poignant. Also it pointed to an elite responsible for the atrocities but managing to remain serenely distant.
For imagery, I was drawn back to Stanley Spencer's war paintings. Spencer was another, this time very English, mystic from the period. I became personally involved in his work in 1986 when I wrote the music for Stanley's Vision - a drama documentary for Channel 4 about Spencer's life starring Ben Kingsley and Brigit Forsyth. In the process of filming and researching my compositions for the film I met members of Spencer's family and got a very strong feeling for the man and his world - a world and sensitive mind that was shattered by The Great War. It was as if those wounds were still palpable down the generations.
With just the chord and some paintings I began recording: firstly with virtuoso trumpeter Ian Dixon. I've worked closely with Ian for many years. He comes from a long line of pacifists who had brought him up to understand the horror of the wars they had experienced. Despite the trumpet being a military and often brash instrument, his playing immediately gave the piece a sadness and a vast expressive range.
The next performance I sought was another military instrument: I asked drummer Mike Bennett to play snare drum. Mike has an encyclopedic knowledge of drum rudiments and being ethnically German has his own family perspective on the wars that ripped Europe apart in the last century.
But I felt I still needed text - either as a song or a spoken word piece. I decided to ask my friend novelist Alan Warner if he would like to put some text together for me. Alongside being one of Scotland's premiere writers, Alan has a deep interest in music and has worked closely with musicians before - so he was a natural choice. I made a mix of the mystic chord, Ian's trumpet and Mike's drumming and sent it to Edinburgh.
When Alan's superb text arrived the whole piece crystallized in a flash. He had chosen to set his text in the weeks directly after the war. Teams of sappers were sent into the enormous battlefields to make them safe, thereby encountering the hideous remains of the war and facing the dangers of all the unspent munitions. It breaks down into seven days, which gives the whole piece its form: for each day I used slightly different instrumentation and sounds whilst maintaining the constant of the chord.
Next I asked Welsh actor Gareth Potter to record Alan's text as a piece of prose. Gareth's rhythm, pacing and Cardiff accent became a cornerstone of the piece. I hardly touched his performance but used it as the framework to hang the other events around.
To create the harmonic background I selected 6 instruments that were popular at the time - male voice, mouth organ, piano, harmonium, whistling and trombone. Each of the instruments plays all six notes of the chord - so each degree of the chord goes through each colour. But as the text is based around seven days I added a seventh element to the harmony - silence. Each note of the chord rotates through the six sounds, then falls silent - like poor Davies in the text. Once I had created this harmonically static but timbrally shifting continuum I then shaped it around Gareth's reading of Alan's text, Ian's trumpet and Mike's snare drum to tell the story. One of the things I'm really proud of with this piece is that despite all the complex and mystical origins of the music that it still feels very rooted in the banal reality of war and it's victims.
The real horror is the blood and the mud - a horror that sweeps down the generations and that all Europeans carry with us.
Biographies
Alan Warner
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth02A14P105712626399
Gareth Potter
http://www.boomtalent.co.uk/index.pl?rm=profile;id=32
Ian Dixon Myspace page
The Resurrection of the Soldiers - Stanley Spencer