YouSaid · the spoken record

John Rutter

lines on the record: 43
first: 2005-12-25
most recent: 2005-12-25
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

“Well, I'm not sure whether from a musician, a musical instrument counts as a luxury because I suppose I'd like to have a viola. And it's the instrument my wife and my son play, and it's my guilty secret that I don't play a stringed instrument. I would love to be able to. With all the time in the world, I think I'd like to learn on my desert island”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This book doesn't actually exist. It would have to be made up specially for me on the desert island, but it would be teach yourself mathematics because I've always felt I should learn mathematics, and it was what my older son Christopher was good at, and perhaps if I really did learn mathematics he might be proud of me. But this is the little twist that I would like it to have illustrations of gorgeous, voluptuous women as portrayed by Rubens and Velasquis and Titian and the great artists of the past because if my motivation weakened a little bit, then maybe I'd just be given a little spur. And of course they'd be a lovely reminder of what I was missing.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh gosh, I think it would have to be Bach. be mine amas. The sound of Bach, I think, would always raise my spirits no matter how depressed I might be.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, on my desert island I would want to end each day peacefully. I don't usually have much trouble getting to sleep, but just in case I did, it would be lovely to listen to and perhaps sing along with the office of Complin, which is the last of the daily monastic offices, sung to Gregory and chant which I've always loved. And this particular recording would be a memento for me of the Cambridge singers, because I know I would miss them terribly on the desert island.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that public worship is rather well public occasions of any kind are different from listening on your own, and I do need that at certain key points in my life. I have been known to sneak into the back of a cathedral when no one's looking.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It would, of course, and I would never set a text I disagree with, and I look for vision and poetry and beauty in all the texts that I set. In a sense I enter into states of faith which are perhaps not my own when I set a religious text to music or when I conduct it. I believe absolutely every syllable of it then.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well yes and no I'm an agnostic, I suppose if you want to stick a label on me but as I get older, the more I realise that the person I am is shaped by the traditions and the ideas of Christianity and of course I just love the music and the liturgy it's been part of my life and to this day the framework of the offices of the church is still something I couldn't be without. I'm just not very good at signing up on dotted lines really and”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is pure self indulgence. Rachmaninoff is a composer who was not awfully fashionable when I started out, and I think his tremendous merits are now appreciated much better. There's a wonderful feeling in the work I've chosen, which is the second symphony, that this was music that just poured out of him. It's music that had to be written. But when the clarinet solo comes in in the slow movement, it's like the composer is speaking personally to each and every one of us”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It wasn't meant to be, but quite a number of people have said that they do see signs of Christopher in that piece. He read computer science at Cambridge. He had the ability that I wished I had and didn't, which was mathematics. And at the same time he was a singer. He had a lovely baritone voice, and so in a sense maybe there's something of him in that piece. It was the first larger scale thing I wrote after his death.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, my older son, Christopher, was nineteen when he was run over in his first year as a student at my old college, Claire, College in Cambridge. And if I had known that we were only going to have nineteen years together, of course I would have spent them differently, but you can't know that in advance.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I regret that now. I think given my time again I perhaps wouldn't be as single minded, and I wouldn't work as hard as I did in those years because I know that I neglected my children, and I wasn't always easy to live with, really because of the stresses and strains of the business and not being well. The trouble with composition is it's a compulsion. It doesn't necessarily make you happy, but you feel you've got to do it. So it is very much a regret that I didn't spend more time with my wife and kids when they were growing up.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I got an illness that I wouldn't recommend to anyone called Mialchik in Keflomyelitis ME for short otherwise known as Yuppy Flu, and it was really seven years, I suppose, in the nineteen eighties where I was well below my best, and so I thought that it wasn't a good idea to continue with commissioned work because in the end you have to deliver a piece by the set agreed time. It's no good finishing a piece the day after the concert.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By accident but I did. I've always adored the musical theatre. I think my parents took me to Oklahoma when I was a kid, and I was hooked. This is by Lerner and Low, and it's from their first successful show Brigadoon. It sums up that wonderful glad to be alive sort of optimism of the American dream and the American musical theatre, and of course it's terribly poignant in a way because so many of Lerner and Lowe's people back in Europe who had not managed to escape Hitler were not alive and when this show was produced in nineteen forty seven there was I think a real resonance to that because life was a gift to be celebrated and there were many who had lost their lives.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Singing to ourselves and singing all my favourite pieces, I always programmed my very favourite bird motets and so forth for weekday evening songs when there wouldn't be a congregation to disturb us. And perhaps that was selfish, but I loved it. And so in the 80s I decided that I would set up my label and that we would essentially just record music which I thought needed recording or hadn't been an awful lot of choral literature was not then as well known as it is now and I had a very expert young choir.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a way that you can't in a live concert, that's true. And I think I developed a taste for that from the years when I was directing Claire Chapel Choir in our lovely little eighteenth century chapel, which would often be empty for a weekday even song. It would be just us and the dean and the lesson reader and the chaplain.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that's right. It started in a very small way. The thing was that I had my choir the Cambridge singers, which I'd set up, and it seemed natural once I'd formed the Cambridge singers to have a home for them on record, because I made a decision which I think was probably the right one not to do live concerts with this choir because I knew once I got drawn into the world of live concerts and touring and promotion and all that kind of thing, I probably would have an excuse never to compose, and I'd have felt bad about myself if I never wrote anything. And so I thought I can limit it to recordings. I like music making just when there's a red light and concentration and no audience, and that's meaningful to me as well.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mozart, if I have to pick just one piece, I would like it to be the piano quartet in G minor because it's the work that my son, who's a violinist, is playing just at this very moment with his friends at school. And this particular performance is rather special because Benjamin Britton is playing the piano party. He was a wonderful pianist, and so it's a reminder of him.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh yes I love conducting mainly because it's not composing, I think, and it's also social. Composition is solitary. I don't really enjoy composing. I like having pieces finished, but starting a new piece is really hell on earth. I mean, that's the moment where you find every possible delaying tactic that you can. And if you happen to be recording or conducting the premiere, that's glorious because that moment of the downbeat when you first hear the things that you've only heard in your head translated into real sound, that's a thrill absolutely like no other.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that's the way that it works, and I've always wanted my compositions to be able to pay their way, and so rather unusually it's my composition which has subsidized other things I've done, like teaching and conducting, rather than the other way around, which is how it often is with composers.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was three hundred and fifty pounds a year, but it did rise to five hundred pounds a year, which was not princely even then, but the master of the college said to me when he offered me the job, well look, you know, you've chosen another profession as composer, so I assume you have an income. And would you be willing to do this for more or less just a small honorarium?”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, that's right. It was a living made up in bits and pieces, but at the time I was only keeping one person, and so I suppose.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in bits and pieces, I did quite a bit of teaching one to one teaching which was paid by the hour, and then I was starting to get commissions little by little as a composer, and so that brought in a certain amount of income, and I worked as a copyist. In the days before computers orchestral parts and always had to be hand copied, and I used to do quite a lot of that, sat up all night sometimes, and”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh good Lord Countless reprints, I think Well, this is actually going off in a different direction really because at that sort of age you always have composer heroes. Composers whose work you just love. And of course with the living ones you think to yourself, well I wonder if one day I might meet him. And it came about in the early nineteen seventies that I actually did meet Sir William Walton. That was a great moment. So I want Sir William Walton on my desert island and I want some Shakespeare and I love film music and so Henry V brings it all together. I would love to hear the human voice on the desert island and of course I would want it to be one of our great Shakespearean actors. And this is Lawrence Olivier.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that series of books got around far more widely than anybody ever thought it would, and here we are sort of forty years on, and people are still caroling away from them. It's rather remarkable.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was a member of his harmony and counterpoint class, and he would look through our harmony exercises, and I think he must have spotted something he liked in one of mine because he took me aside and said, Well, I believe that you've been writing some Christmas carols, and of course my heart sank at that point because I thought, oh dear, you know, here's the king of the Christmas carol. And he said, would you come and present yourself at my rooms at nine o'clock on Monday morning and bring along some of what you've written? And in fact, he looked through a number of pieces, including, I think, the Shepherd's pipe carol, without a word, and at the end of it he looked up from his desk and said, Would you be interested in these being published? And I didn't argue with him. And within, I think, a matter of just a few days I got an offer of publication.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that was a wrong turning, and I went in for the Cambridge Scholarship exam in modern languages, but on presenting myself for interview I said to the senior tutor, look, I may as well come clean about this. I don't actually want to do modern languages. Can I please do music instead? And he puffed at his pipe and said, Oh well, we've got quite a few of those around here. I mean, I'm sure he'll fit in.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was fourteen, and I think that singing that work was what made me think nothing else will do but music I want to make this my life. I want to be involved in this forever.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He seemed to be watching you wherever you were, he never raised his voice, he didn't have to. He had natural authority, and he had us under his spell. We sang in so many wonderful pieces at school, and the second great work I sang in was the Bach B minor mass, and of course at Christmas time the words of the angels to the shepherds Gloria and Excelsis Deo just sum up what it's all about.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We did because our school choir was a good one, and we were sometimes asked to take part in symphonic performances of works that needed a boy's choir, and I suppose the war requiem was the most remarkable example of that. It was very new. And when it came to the recording in nineteen sixty three, our school choir. I'm in it. And if you listen very hard, you can hear a rather squawky alto, and that's me. And of course it was a life changing experience because we all knew that we were touching the hem of musical history, garment really. It was extraordinary.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, of course, I mean, he was the lanky lad who used to stand next to me in choir. And it was clear, I think, even then that he was destined for fame and fortune. And then on my very first day at Highgate, my shepherd, as it were, the person who was assigned to show me around, was a lad called Nicholas Snowman, and I said to him, What do you want to do when you grow up? And he said, I want to run Linborne. And he achieved it. He did it. There was Howard Shelley, who, of course, was even then prodigiously wonderful pianist.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many the thing was that it all stemmed really from an inspirational director of music, whose name was Edward Chapman. He had a breadth of musicianship, which I think we couldn't but learn from, and he instilled in all of us a kind of confidence to have a go at music, and to spread our wings and composition was thought of as quite normal that a number of us would actually scribble all sorts of things in our little notebooks.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely all sorts but great works were sung by the concert chorus I remember not just Messiah and all of those, but we did the Tippet child of our time in the presence of the composer one year. Very adventurous. He didn't smile much during the performance. I don't think it was our finest hour, might have been a little beyond us. Oh,”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a flat over a pub which is there to this day in Baker Street called the Globe, and like many people after the war my parents couldn't really find anywhere to live, and my grandma kept this pub, rather large gloomy place, I think they've cheered it up now, and that's where I spent the first ten years of my life Well, I think that every day would begin on the desert island, probably with a beautiful sunrise, but in case it didn't, it would be lovely to have a musical evocation.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My father was an industrial chemist, and my mum really looked after me, and so she didn't work outside the home at that time.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I could just play it I used to listen to things on the radio and pick them out on the piano, singing along in a piping treble voice. And this was quite bewildering to my parents.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was an old upright piano that was in our flat, left there by the previous occupants because they couldn't get it down the stairs. It was horribly out of tune, but I can't have been more than three or four years old when I first climbed up to it and instantly entered a world of magic that I've been inhabiting ever since really”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My wife has had a little search, but hasn't come up with any composers or musicians that we know of, except back in the Tudor court there was a very obscure composer called Rutter, and not one note of his work survives, and so my ancestor might have served King Henry VIII, but really I can't tell you any more than that, and certainly my immediate family was not musical.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think I would want to celebrate Christmas even though I was by myself on my desert island, and I would also want to be reminded of Christmas in Cambridge, and for me nothing sums it up better than the choir of King's College singing in the bleak midwinter by Harold Dark”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I mean very often you begin with a complex idea as a composer and you refine it down until it becomes simpler and simpler. I love melody and I grew up singing from when I was very small and so I think I have just a sense a sense of melody which is probably a pure gift.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and I suppose the thing is this that I was trained as a classical musician, but as a classical composer there weren't very many outlets for what you could loosely call hummable tunes in the nineteen fifties and sixties when I started, and I think it was just a way of slipping a few tunes in at a time of year when nobody would mind.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's a general amnesty on modernism in the month of Christmas, and you're allowed to be simple, and that's something that I've always appreciated because when I started out as a composer, simplicity was not something that was generally allowed.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm a magpie. I think composers are divided into two types there's explorers whose destiny is to discover new sounds. And I think there's those like me who are very happy to use all of the sounds and the ideas that are there and to make a personal synthesis of them. And so I don't think I've trodden any new paths I'm afraid. But people do tell me my music does sound like me.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was I think the year was nineteen sixty six, and the occasion was a concert in Clare College, where there was a little gap at the end, and I thought I need just a bit more music to pad out the program, so I thought I would write a carol.”
2005-12-25 · Desert Island Discs · John Rutter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source