Fergus Johnston

News

17th March 2009: In response to recent criticism

This is a rant. I'm sick of a certain critic who flicks his critical snot onto the pages of the press, unchallenged. After his last poisoned pen remarks about the "Scenes and Interludes from the Earl of Kildare" this worm turns. It's not so much the comments, as the tone of the comments which I take exception to.

"Freshness was not top of the agenda" set it off . This was merely a bridge to get from one paragraph to the next, and a clumsy one at that. But the implication is that the music is stale by my omission of something which I didn't put high enough on my agenda, with the further implication of carelessness. In fact the idiom was deliberately chosen to create a sense of nostalgia, and it was done well.

In the first extract, Thomas is in jail, thinking over his fate. He feels nostalgic. Of course the music dwelt in the past. It's meant to. But the critic doesn't get it. He takes my achievement of nostalgia in the music and tries to use it against me.

As to the comment that the second movement "sounded decidedly Ligetian", the use of that qualifier "decidedly" was the first of two attempted put-downs; if "sounded Ligetian" alone was used, it could be construed as a compliment, but "decidedly Ligetian" implies something else, such as "undeniably Ligetian", as though I was denying that it sounded "Ligetian".

The second put-down: The use of "Ligetian" itself suggests that the music was not original. Well, those were Shepard scales. Shepard scales have been around since 1964 when Roger Shepard published his "Circularity in judgements of relative pitch". They were orchestrated by me. If Ligeti used them, he borrowed the idea from Shepard, and was being just as unoriginal as I.

"And the third movement was busily garrulous", he wrote. A single sentence, dismissive in tone, starting with a conjunction, and using the tautology of the final two words to twist the knife. Yes. It was busy, even garrulous. That was the intention. It is composed using the music of Frances, wife of Thomas, and I composed her character in the opera as a gossipy frivolous airhead. Again, it was meant. Again, he attempts to take my achievement and turn it against me.

It is the critic's job to understand the intent implicit in the creation. By this measure, this criticism was either shoddy work, or a deliberate attempt to discredit my achievement. In either case, shame.
Ah, vermin laced, and garrulous yourself!