John Rutter

John Rutter’s dining room table is just how you’d expect it to be. Strewn with manuscript papers.

As the go-to composer for the likes of William and Kate (commission: a hymn for the Royal Wedding) and even the Queen herself (commission: an ode for the Magna Carta celebrations), he’s a busy, busy man. And when he’s not composing, he’s travelling the world to conduct, arrange, produce, lecture, record, lead workshops… Surely it’s an exhausting life for someone who’s about to turn 70?

“Shhh!” hisses John, flapping his hands with pantomime gusto. “If you absolutely must mention the figure 70, I can’t stop you, but it labels you. You stop being ‘John Rutter, Musician’, and you become ‘John Rutter, Veteran Musician’, and people start giving up their seat for you in trains!

“No, I can honestly say that the life I now lead is very much the same as the life I had 30 years ago, and I’ll just carry on until there stops being a demand for my services. As long as you can lift your arms, you can still hear and you can still see, you can continue to be useful as a musician.”

Next Saturday John will be taking a (very short) break from his frantic schedule to give a talk at the News-backed Cambridge Summer Music Festival, which is devoting a whole day to his work. The title is Confessions of a Composer: what exactly will he be confessing to? “Nothing salacious,” says John, with a wide grin. “It’s just a silly title for a very light-hearted ramble through the life that I’ve led in music. I’m looking forward to spilling the beans.”

The bean-spillage is likely to be fascinating. He’s best-known, of course, for his gloriously uplifting Christmas carols, but John - who lives just north of Cambridge with his wife JoAnne - is as versatile as he is prolific. He’s penned everything from large-scale choral works and children’s operas to piano concertos and madrigals - not bad, given that his headmaster advised him against a career in music.

Growing up in North London, John’s earliest musical memory is discovering the old upright piano that stood, untuned and unloved, in the corner of his family’s top-floor flat. “There was no lift, and the only reason it was there was that the previous occupants couldn’t get it down the stairs,” he says. “One day, aged about 4 or 5, I climbed up, and from that moment on I spent hours doodling away. In a way I’m doing the same thing all these years later, except that I get paid for it! I’m still the little boy doodling away in a world of his own...”

At Highgate School, John submerged himself in music alongside his “best buddy”, the late great John Tavener, “who was clearly marked out for fame and fortune as a composer.” Wasn’t he too? “My headmaster thought I should be an academic,” he shrugs. “There were a lot of musical boys at our school, and I’m not sure that my gift was as obvious. What he saw was that I wanted to gamble everything on a very chancy profession, when I could have the safe prospect of teaching at a university.”

And not even teaching music. John was initially sent to Clare College to take scholarship exams in modern languages, “and God bless the senior tutor: I went through all of the interview process, and I said ‘Look, I’ve got a confession, I don’t want to do this! What I really want to do is music’. And he puffed his pipe and didn’t miss a beat, and said ‘Well I guess that’s all right’.”

As a music scholar, John positively blossomed at Cambridge. By the time he graduated he was a published composer, and commissions began to pour in. He went on to spend four years as director of music at Clare, “but I realised I needed more time to compose, and I was finding I had to keep turning down lovely invitations to conduct and visit and be composer-in-residence of universities abroad.”

He gave up the directorship in 1979, but his association with Clare continues to this day: as an honorary fellow, John has “all of the nice privileges but none of the duties! And I continue to be the recording producer for the choir: I’m the bad guy who says ‘Can we have the last 16 bars again, please?’”

His boys followed in his footsteps; both were undergraduates at Clare, both sang in the chapel choir. His younger son Nick has since become a sought-after arts photographer, but tragically in 2001 his elder son Christopher was knocked down by a car and killed as he crossed Queens Road. He was 19.

Needless to say, John was devastated. “I was worried that I wouldn’t enjoy music-making anymore, and that I wouldn’t want to write,” he recalls. “And perhaps this was fate taking a hand, but I had some recording sessions planned shortly before Christopher’s death, which were scheduled for five or six weeks after he died, as it turned out. So there was kind of family conference about ‘Do you want to go ahead with this, or would you rather just cancel?’, and something in me said ‘Oh come on, just do it’. And I’m very glad I did, because I thoroughly enjoyed it, and in a way it marked the beginning of the way back. So music played a valuable part.”

He has never written anything specifically in memory of his son, “but the first larger-scale work that I wrote after his death, which was called Mass of the Children, JoAnne said - and friends say - that they could see Christopher written all over it. So maybe that is the piece. It’s quite sunny actually; it’s not got terribly much of the dark side at all. But then I don’t really do the dark side. I reckon we get enough of that in real life.”

Is his work perhaps too sunny? His critics have suggested so, but John isn’t remotely bothered. “I think some critics are suspicious of any music, or works of art, novels, whatever it may be, that touch too many people,” he says. “You can’t please everybody.”

But he clearly pleases almost everybody, and frequently finds himself commissioned to write music for momentous occasions. “The last couple of pieces couldn’t have been more different,” he says, explaining that the first was for last month’s Magna Carta celebrations at Runnymede: “The organisers said ‘Can you write an ode of welcome for the Queen?’ Well you can’t very well say no!” The second, “springing out of a tragedy”, was to compose a piece in memory of John Hughes, the he hugely-popular dean of Jesus College who was killed, aged 35, in a road accident last year.

Does he think about the person when he’s writing? “I didn’t need to think about the Queen, because I know what she’s like! But I did want to know a bit about John Hughes. I was given a very good pen portrait of him by the director of Jesus College Choir, who explained how he had been an undergraduate at Jesus, and came back as a young chaplain, and everybody liked him so much they made him dean, and he hadn’t been terribly long in the job and…” He clicks his fingers. “His car skidded off the road and burst into flames, and they couldn’t drag him out in time. That was all awful, but I hope that out of it will come happy memories of somebody who, in his all-too-short life, contributed such a lot and is very fondly remembered.

“And of course music is there on the flagship occasions in people’s life journey: the baptisms, the weddings, the funerals, the memorials,” he adds. “Ever so many people will tell me ‘We had your Gaelic Blessing at our wedding’, or ‘When my mum died we had The Lord Bless You and Keep You, or ‘We had For the Beauty of the Earth when we baptised our little twin sons’, or whatever. That’s really the space I think I’ve occupied in people’s lives, and it is a great privilege.

“I’m sometimes accused of being sentimental and gloopy, but I think some of that is just the sort of occasions that I find my music gets used on. And well, if I am heart-on-sleeve, I hope it’s because I’ve got a heart!

“As a composer, the nice thing is that it may well live on after you’re no longer here to hear it, and I hope my music might be remembered for…” he pauses. “Well, we all want to be told we write like an angel! But beyond that I’d like to be remembered as a composer whose music touched people’s hearts.”

July 2015 (c) Cambridge News