YouSaid · the spoken record

Howard Goodall

lines on the record: 52
first: 2008-05-25
most recent: 2008-05-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I'd like the diary of Anne Frank I'd like that because when I'm feeling low or self indulgent about being on the island on my own, it would be wonderful to be reminded that it's really not that bad, and the positive approach to life that there's good in everything somewhere if you know where to find it, that comes out of that extraordinary piece of writing by a young person, I think would be a really good thing for me to be reminded of, apart from the fact it's a beautiful piece of writing, and the tragedy of what happened to the Jews in the twentieth century is something that haunts me, and I would want to be reminded other people's lives.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there is very beautiful modern music written for orchestra that's film music and a very, very good example of this would be John Williams' score for Schinder's list, which is utterly beautiful, incredibly moving, has incredible integrity as a piece of music. Apart from anything else, I have always my life had an enormous respect for Jewish culture and have engaged with it myself as a writer. To have Schinder's list music playing to me on their own would mean a lot to me.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it will it will be there, and I hope I've got a way of preserving it somehow, you know, maybe writing it in the sand or something so that I can keep those compositions going. I think that carrying music in your head is mostly a great blessing, but sometimes a piece gets in there and won't dislodge itself, and the only way of dislodging it is to write it down or to overrun it with something else, which means hearing a new piece of music by someone else, or writing a new piece myself to sort of rub it off.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is different. I suppose as I've got older my music in my head has become more layered, more sophisticated. I'm sure that's the case. Though I have always loved melody, and melody is really key to the way I write, I think that a piece of music, however layered and richly textured it may be, if it doesn't have a melody, it's really hard to latch onto it for it to have emotional power.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know I don't really like showing off music you know Beethoven is a brilliant composer absolutely brilliant he was a genius and his music is full of cleverness and structural ingenuity and his relationship with the new instrument of the piano was amazing he understood what it could do but there's something a bit sherry offy about his music that doesn't really speak to me emotionally it's probably a failing in me not Beethoven by the way”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am a great admirer of Sting. I love it when people bring in inferences from other fields of music, and they have a kind of blotting paper approach to other cultures and sounds, and they have a way of focusing into their own style. This song all this time is about his dad and about his growing up in the northeast, and it's about the river tying going out to the sea. It also has in it a wonderful line that is one of my kind of lines for life, which is people go crazy in congregations that only get better one by one. And again, it's a British thing. This is music from the British Isles. It couldn't be anywhere else. His style, the way he's brought it together, the melodies, the shape of the sound, is the music of these islands.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I head up in a spearhead sort of spokesman like way, a project which is to get singing to be absolutely a normal everyday part, group singing of every primary school in the countries activity that they do. Singing is really good for you, particularly as a child to learn, makes your brain work better, it makes your memory work better, makes you feel better, gives you great self-esteem, it brings communities together. There's no downside to it whatsoever, and we've been given money by their government and support to do this over a four year period. What a great opportunity to be given.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I suppose my dad was a teacher, and I suppose I've got teacher's blood in me DNA, and I'm a natural teacher. In fact, some people say I'm a bit lectury. And I suppose if I hadn't been a professional composer, I would probably have been a teacher.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is Absolutely, and I think that people who really love classical music and don't know much about popular music, and vice versa, have a lot to learn from each other. It's a totally two way flowing river, and so it's my duty, I think, to explain to people how that river works, that music is music, it belongs to everybody, and it is changing all the time in subtle ways that are related to each other.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will my target audience, I think, is people who love music but are not musically trained particularly, and I want them to feel that they know a bit more about it and therefore can get more out of the experience. I mean, I really think that a lot of people's fear of music is to do with the jargon and the kind of technical stuff that surrounds it. And I think it should be possible to strip all that away and say, no, listen to this properly in an intelligent way and not be patronising to people, but actually to remove that jargon.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My next piece of music is windmills of your mind by Michel Grant and by Nell Harrison. Some people remember it from the Thomas Crown Affair movie. This reminds me so much of my stepdaughters because in the car we'll put this on, and they both know all the words to all the songs we put on in the car and we all sing along to these songs. If I ever want to capture that moment we're in the car together singing a song, this would be the one that would remind me of Daisy Minnie.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were very young, I guess they were five and eight at the time. I absolutely dote on them. I think they're fantastic.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, we do. We don't do everything together and she's not my own agent, but we do lots of things together. We've very shared interests in music and shared love of music. And we do work easily together, yeah.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I suppose it happened more gradually the second time because we saw each other through work, and it was not going to be quite so nerve wracking. And also, if by the time you're in your late thirties you haven't cracked that one of how to ask someone out, you really are lost.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, she's a music relation, and we've done some work together from time to time as maize. But there had been long periods where we'd gone off and not seen each other for quite a long time, and we both married other people and had other lives.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I actually sent her a note saying would you fancy coming out for supper? The answer was no, by the way, she was busy, and amazingly she kept the note, and twenty one years later, when we were going to get married, she went up and looked in a trunk in the academy and got it, and so we reproduced this exact note that I'd written as our wedding invitation to people who came.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Derufle Requiem is one of my favourite pieces in the world, and I really associate this piece now with my wife Fal because we have a house in France where I do a lot of my composing, and thou wilt often put on this piece on the stereo down in the kitchen, when I'm in my composing room upstairs, and she put it on quite loud and sing along with it. But because of the distance between the kitchen and where I am composing it, all I can hear is her, the voice singing, this French requiem piece, and not really the accompaniment below.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, they did. My parents still go to see it now twenty years on this dog and sit through it and enjoy it on my other musicals too, so they're very, very loyal like that. They'll trapes anywhere and see my pieces.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can remember it, you know, I get very, very nervous seeing my pieces with an audience in the room. I did then and I'm still now. I kind of assume they're not enjoying it. and that they're going to leave any moment now. I much prefer the rehearsals when there's no one else there.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I suppose I began to think quite early on I'd like to do a musical relatively early on in my twenties I did write a musical with Melvin Bragg called The High of Mam, which did eventually go to the West End, and I suppose I would have wanted that to have become something that was regularly happened, but getting musicals on in the West End is a pretty difficult thing to do.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it took me between leaving college to the point where I could live just on earnings from music, from composing, it took me eight years, and in those eight years immediately after college, you know, I did bits and pieces, I played as a session player, went on tour for a few weeks a year with Ronan and Richard, and things like that. I just sort of held it together as best I could. You have to be terribly patient, because it's not going to be instant that anybody starts to make a living from composing.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. A bit of a cliche, wasn't it? I wrote a musical and she was the leading lady in it, and we got together and got married. It was a shortish marriage.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other thing I listen to more or less all the time as well as Mana at University was Stevie Wonder, and on that island I want to put something on that will make me want to dance and feel that life is happy and exciting, I wish would do that.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It might have been a factor, yes, it didn't really work. You know, in my last week of my last year at university, I finally plucked up the courage to ask out this girl to whom I'm now married, by the way. You know, I've been wanted to ask her out for a year, and I finally asked her out, and she did say no. But you would be so long.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't think so. I got lots of things out of it. It was wonderful to learn about music as I love my subject, and you've got these great libraries and performances going on everywhere. But I don't think when I left I knew what I was going to do. I kind of think I wanted to be in music. I suppose I probably still wanted to be a pop star. I wanted to write musicals. I wanted to carry on doing my work with Ronan Richard. But I had no real focus of idea what I was going to do. And I went and lived in a bedsit in Kilburn.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it wasn't a gay social world. I mean, I did see them more or less every day of my time there, but we were a slightly quiet group, I think it would be fair to say. I wasn't really a party person at university at all, nor was Rowan. Richard was a bit more partyish. Yea, I was in the same room.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Rome even then was doing a lot of kind of mimey weirdo characters that turned into the kind of bean like characters he did later, that and a combination of kind of schoolmastery bossy characters which sort of more or less turned into black adder. And people would just, when they saw him for the first time, really helpless, helpless for whole periods of the show, people would be just out of control laughing so much because it was so different.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Weirdly I met both of them on my very first day at university. They'd already been there for a year, and I went to the Fresher's Fair to see what clubs I was going to join in and all that kind of stuff. They were all of these stalls, you know, the rowing club and all that kind of stuff. And I thought, what I'd like to do is write music for the comedy review. So I went up to this desk and the Blake said, well, what do you do? And I said, well, I write music. I'd really like to be involved. He said, well, put your name down there and what college you're in. And someone will come and see you this afternoon and talk about it. Well, the guy at the desk with Rowan, and the guy who came to see me later afternoon was Richard. Of course they were just two students at the time. It wasn't a big deal. And Richard came to see me and he said, we're doing a show in the playhouse in three weeks time a review. Do you want to do the music? I've literally walked into university. There's been hours with arriving. I said, of course I would. I'd love to. So that's how it started. Now we did comedy shows together all through my time at university.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“knew what was happening to her as she sang this last grey effort was to sing this piece one more time, and miraculously it was captured in a recording.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I was at university at Oxford, I had two kind of soundtracks, and one of them was Marla, I did a social thesis on Marla and I absolutely fell for the music of Gustav Marla. I have chosen a piece of Marla which is an incredibly significant Kathleen Ferrier, the great English singer, in the last few months of her life she was dying of cancer, went to Vienna to perform Daslidfonte with Bruno Valtar's conductor, who was a protege of Marla himself. And it's a live performance that was recorded in nineteen fifty two, and the last movement of the pieces could de Absit the farewell, and the last few words just goig forever forever. Marla was trying to create the idea that the piece never really went away, it just drifted off into the ether, and it's unbearably moving listening to this woman seeing this final part of this great work that came from the end of Marla's life.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“although I was at an all boys school initially in the middle of nowhere. So I don't know which girls I thought I was going to impress, certainly not matron.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, adolescents came along, and I was writing, started to write songs in the kind of Gilbert O'Sullivan Leonard McCartney Manor. Obviously the idea was to try and impress girls.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. You might have been indulging. He was a very nice man. I mean, looking back at it, I think probably it was a very generous thing to ask a chorister who he knew was composing to do one of his pieces. His name is David Lumson. He was a very great choir master, and he probably had no idea what an impact that had on me having the choir sing one of my pieces. I mean, I thought, gosh, you know, I could do this.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I suppose in those days it was came as a bit of a surprise'cause I was putting down music on the page I didn't really know exactly what it sounded like.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was a chorister, therefore I wrote music that I thought the choir would sing, and eventually by the time I was twelve or thirteen the choir did sing a couple of my pieces, which was an immensely exciting thing to have.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I've had a kind of 20-year relationship with them, and Stephen Dyington, who's their conductor, has a tremendous empathy with my music, and so I've done so much with them. So hearing that sound is very emotional for me, actually.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My iconic composer when I was a chorister was William Byrd, the Tudor composer who was a contemporary of Shakespeare. My grandmother's name was Bird, and I had this little fantasy that she came from East Anglia, my grandmother, and I had this fantasy that may be Bird who came from East Anglia was maybe a relative of mine. And in fact, I was going to play William Bird in the film Elizabeth and had been cast and everything, had signed a contract, and went to Durham Cathedral to film my scene as William Byrd, which had a climax of my whole career. And the scene was cut. Agony. I was gutted, although I'm no actor. Perhaps it would have been cut anyway after I'd done the performance. So I've chosen his mass for five voices, which is very, very beautiful Renaissance English music.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I think my parents had actually thought it would protect me not to be at my dad's school, and so I'd looked for an alternative. As it happened, when I moved to Tame to my local school, the fact that my dad was a principal didn't seem to be an issue at all.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it made me quite a left wing person being at Stone. Did it? Yeah. I think seeing what people with privilege can be like. Of course, this was before they introduced girls to Stowe, and I'm sure that improved it no end. And then at sixteen I transferred to my local comprehensive school where I was much happier. But you know, there could have been people who'd done the opposite and who would have been happier at Stowe. It just wasn't for me.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's quieter kind of macho thing, quite an emphasis on being strong and being a man and growing up and all that. The other pupils were often quite privileged and quite wealthy. And I think that there was a slight arrogance to, I think, the ethos of the place at the time.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. How was that? It wasn't ready for me, you know, lots of people loved it and had a great time. It just didn't really fit with me.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, in my spare time I just went either to the piano or the organ which I was mad about when I was that age, or to my music paper and were just composing, composing post in my spare times, my favourite thing to do.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think there was times with her after we had holidays, and we were made to play sport and all those things, so it was not like it was so exclusive that we only did music all day long.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is disciplined, but if you ask any chorister today and then what they most like about it is, it's the total immersion in beautiful music. You have a normal life as a school child the rest of the time, and then for an hour a day or an hour and a half or half an hour a day, whatever it is, you sing this exquisite music. And it's just a great way of going through life.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think being three boys in relatively close ages it's impossible not to be a bit competitive I don't see that as a bad thing though all three of us were choristers at the same choir school in Oxford and I think being the second is a really good position to be in because your older brother breaks the ice creates the social safety for you is there if there's trouble you know and all that and it's great to be the second one”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, music lovers, not professional musicians, but lovers of music, and our house had loads of music all the time, classical music, pop music.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My first piece of music is the Beatles, I suppose because I'm the generation I am. The Beatles are very important to my childhood. I love the Beatleshead in my parents. We listen to it in our home. And this particular song for me says everything It's half written by Paul McCartney and half written by John Lennon so it's a real Beatles coming together of their talents. I find the idea of a song called We Can Work It Out just so perfect that's what someone would write if they were from Britain. They would think there's a way through this, we'll talk it through, we'll find a compromise.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, there has been a very big choice of favourite pieces of music and very wide choice that I've had to narrow down, but I really thought it would be good to think of things that were really special to me as opposed to just really lovely music. Because I would like to think that out there on that island I could probably summon up a bit of a CD collection in my head if I really worked hard at it.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I lost my memory for a day as a result of that banged my head, and the musical bit I knew for the first few hours wasn't there, and then eventually it kind of booted in all in one go, and in those hours when it had gone it was very scary. But then I think it would be scary for anybody to lose their memory for a period of time.”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No I can't imagine what would be in my head without it It is like a soundtrack that's there the whole time and it's not you know it's not a bad thing Sometimes it's something I know you know like it would be for anybody remembering a favourite tune or record or something but often it's just this other music that's there”
2008-05-25 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Goodall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source