R.A. Moulds

Considering that my last meditation, so to speak, was all about looking forward and not backward, it is a bit awkward to observe that I’ve spent a great part of the last few weeks digging through old files and papers in the vain hope of bringing some order to the flotsam that has accumulated during the past forty years. I am happy to say that I have so far managed to stave off the inclination toward hoarding that was once my mother’s secret indulgence, but there are still a few storage bins in the cellar that are suspiciously full of unidentified paper.

I opened one of those bins last week and, sure enough, I discovered a cache of old manuscripts and assorted scribblings, many of them my earliest attempts at uninformed and imitative composition. How strange and in a way, terrifying, to find these sketches again after so many years. I have habitually kept a numbered list of works, both completed and unfinished, since I first began to play at composing, but in all honesty many of the early works have been just titles in an index for a very long time. In spite of the risk of mold and paper mites, I have now spent an hour or two looking through the relics, and I have both good news and bad news.

The good news is that there will be no Simple Symphony or Wand of Youth forthcoming. Very little I found was noteworthy in any way, unless the samples could be used in a “Don’t Let This Happen to You” chapter in a book on composition. It was interesting, I will admit, to trace a path of creative thought from the simplest tonal miniatures to the first stirrings of what would become, for a time, a taste for unrelenting and unremitting atonality.

The bad news is that, after a bout of nausea induced by this temporary resurrection of what are, in effect, rotted corpses, I’ve comforted myself with an imitation of Jean Sibelius’ “burning party” at Ainola, reported by Aino Sibelius as having taken place in the 1940s, in which it is thought that the expected 8^th Symphony was consigned to the flames. The difference is, of course, that Sibelius was, by his own admission, trying to avoid the likelihood of anyone publishing his sketches as “Sibelius’ Last Thoughts” after his death, and I, obviously, am just as keen to forestall “Moulds’ First Blots.”

One of my oldest friends, Rob Haskins, is a respected musicologist at the University of New Hampshire, and he and I have had several discussions about the disposition of manuscripts. I am not certain that I have an opinion on what others should do with their accumulated sketches and first, second, or third attempts; one can make a case, certainly, as Rob has often done, that such detritus is of great value after a composer’s death—surely it would have been a sad thing to be deprived of Beethoven’s sketchbooks, the fragments of Mahler’s 10^th Symphony, or the instructions that allowed Alfano to complete Puccini’s Turandot.

Of course, the sacrifice of my puerile scribbles does not compare in any way with the loss we might have experienced had any of these other works disappeared, nor can we draw a parallel between the destruction of a few infant aspirations and the masterwork that Sibelius’ 8^th Symphony should have been. I understand the dismay that Rob experiences in contemplating the resulting lacunae in my ultimate List of Works, but to be quite honest, once I’m gone I probably won’t care all that much, and it seems rather self-important to imagine that anyone in the future will be studying my catalog even in the most indiscriminate fashion.

The real interest in the entire question—at least for me—lies in deciding what to keep; what is worth preserving, even for a limited future? For me, this means notating the work in Sibelius and resisting the urge to edit or alter the pieces. There is no formula for retention, truly, and so far what has been saved from the flames has been work that reflects a new direction or an interesting experiment. Sometimes—just sometimes—I choose to keep it simply because it does not offend me. Two works, certainly, might be seen as rather odd, owing to subsequent changes in my view of the world—I am being completely honest when I say that I look at works of a religious character and wonder what on earth I must have been thinking. (The Christmas cantata that I wrote for my mother’s church is, without exaggeration, a very strange creature; in reading it over now I am not sure whether I wrote it with a sense of unconscious parody, or whether I was being naively and mystifyingly sincere. The work, with all its homespun poetry and clumsy Americana, deserves preservation for its curiosity value if nothing else.)

At the end of the day, my choices are necessarily limited, but if I have any legacy at all, I have a feeling it is worth arranging it into a picture that is as accurate a reflection of R.A. Moulds as I can muster. The next question to resolve, I suppose, is where to put it all when I go. Any takers?

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