Transcript

Presenter: From Bach to the Beatles, from madrigals to Motown, there have been people who have made a living out of writing music. One such is the composer of this particular piece …

Vince: My name’s Vince Cross. I’m a musician, primarily a composer. I suppose my basic skill is as a keyboard player: synthesizers, pianos, even an organ on a good day. And that has led me in the 1980s and 1990s into composing because um… keyboards have become the staple instrumentation for contemporary music, whether that’s pop or whether it’s more serious. And I suppose now I make a lot more of my living from composing than I do from playing keyboards… um… perhaps because I’m in the end actually better at that.

Presenter: So who does he compose music for?

Vince: Sammy Cahn, the American songwriter, m… made a joke when he was asked… um… about songwriting, whether he thought up the words or the music first, and he said, ‘First comes the phone call’. And it really depends on who phones me up and says that they need music to be written. That has very often been… er… people who require music for children in the past five to seven years, um… but it equally well be… could be for TV or radio commercials … er… for small-scale films… um… and recently for a TV series.

Presenter: Does he compose in a particular style?

Vince: No, I’m again… people have different strengths. Um… I’m no Mozart or Schoenberg or … By that I mean that I’m not the kind of person who’s going to be an incredibly original composer who’s going to do something new. Um… but I’m quite a good musical thief, in the sense that I can listen to a style of music and go away and come up with a piece of music that sounds quite similar to the style that I’ve just heard – again, whether that’s pop or classical. So recently somebody said that they wanted some baroque music for a film about the Tower of London, and I went away and did that. Um… equally well if somebody says to me they want a piece of rock’n’roll… um… I would hope to be able to manage that. And sometimes I get odd requests, like for a Mexican piece of music, or… er… next week I have to do a particularly African piece of music. And that’s good fun, it’s a challenge for me to come up with something in that style. It’s probably got my stamp on it, but… er… er… it’s good.

Presenter: What for Vince are the rewards of his work?

Vince: I’m one of those people who’s lucky enough to be able to combine their favourite hobby… er… with their way of earning a living… er… and when everything is going well of course that can be a great reward. Perhaps you lose something too, but I still think it’s a… it’s a pretty special way of being able to… to live is to do that. Er… the downside, the… the bad things about… er… being involved in music are that sometimes one works very long hours… um… and there is, as there is for all people who are self-employed, there’s the pressure that you’re earning your living really from the jobs you come up with, and therefore… um… nobody is paying you. Er… and of course if you’re in a paid job there may be many days when… er… you may not be working very hard but you’re still being paid for it. If I’m not working very hard I don’t get paid for it most of the time.

Presenter: Most of Vince’s work is commissioned, which means he’s working to a client’s brief. Does he ever get the opportunity to compose music for his own satisfaction?

Vince: Mm, I’m a songwriter really. And that means that I will tend to write my own lyrics as well as… er… music. And yes, I do do that. Um… it’s a bit of an unpredictable pastime, because there are occasions when you wake up in the morning and you have an idea for a song and you write it. There may be months when you don’t write anything for your own benefit at all. Um… it’s often useful also to have people you work with, singers maybe, of whom you’re fond, who will tend to inspire you to… to write things with them in mind. Um… and for the future, I hope to write musical theatre, and that’s something that you can only write, generally speaking, because you want to. But the problem is to make enough time… er… to do that, and… um… that requires, generally speaking, that you’ve made a lot of money at something else and therefore you can take a month off and… and write at your leisure… um… but yes, I write for my own pleasure too.

Presenter: What is it that he gets out of composing? What is the personal satisfaction?

Vince: That’s a very good question, and I think it’s actually quite difficult to answer. Um, there are… there are a couple of things that come to mind immediately: one is that it’s a very… it’s a very physical sensation, and most of my life has been spent with ideas, um… university and… and I was a teacher for a while. There is something very physical, almost like making something with your hands, about writing a song. Um… there is something that you can hear, and you can actually look at if you’ve written it down, at the close of that. And I find that a rather nice thing. There is also I think in a lot of musicians something a bit obsessive, um… you’re trying to achieve perfection in one particular area. Um… and maybe that’s what a… an instrumentalist is doing when he’s practising day after day. You think, ‘How can somebody just practise the piano for eight hours a day?’ Well, it’s trying to get something right, um… and you’ve got to be obsessive. You’ve got to be very ‘grooved’, I think, to want to do that, and I recognize in myself that there is a bit of my personality that’s like that.

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