For over sixty years the Dartington International Summer School in Devon has attracted major international composers. In its early days, Copland, Maderna, Nono and Boulanger all visited, and in the extraordinary year of 1957 Stravinsky was there and the composition class included Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle, Alexander Goehr, Hugh Wood, Richard Rodney Bennett and Cornelius Cardew, all still students. Birtwistle was there again in August 2013, when the interviews for this chapter took place.

The Dartington Summer School has a unique place in the musical calendar: it offers a rare shared space for amateurs, students and audience to interact with professionals, teachers, performers and composers. In 2013 the amateur string quartet having tea on the lawn could overhear Birtwistle discussing Brahms with John Woolrich and Stephen Kovacevich, and learn from Birtwistle that while he wrote his own Piano Concerto he was listening to Schumann’s.

The interviews involve John Woolrich, then Artistic Director of the Summer School, Philip Cashian, leading a course on composition teaching in schools, and Harrison Birtwistle, composer in residence. These three composers were interviewed by Peter Wiegold, together with music teacher and composer Amoret Abis; they took place on successive days in the Upper Solar, a panelled room above the medieval Great Hall. On the fourth day, Woolrich interviewed Wiegold.

We have cut these separate conversations together, and the composers discuss amateur music-making, the development of compositional craft, the composer’s responsibility to society, and the importance to Britten of ‘personality, gift, spirit’. Perhaps they reflect a special community, almost a ‘guild’ – that of composers themselves. The composers of the past are constantly in their ear and mind; they dialogue with contemporary colleagues, and feel a commitment to the sustaining of their art, a responsibility to the next generations.

Amateur Music-making

HB: Britten had this insatiable idea about the amateur. It’s of no interest to me. I think it’s wonderful for people to come here to Dartington and play Beethoven Five. They’ll have a nice time and they’ve got their toe in the water of something quite interesting, but I don’t want to hear it.