Kate Molleson

The BBC Radio 3 broadcaster talks about her book Sound Within Sound and picks three books about music that she's enjoyed

Photo from Faber & Faber

Kate Molleson is a radio broadcaster, familiar to any current listener of BBC Radio 3, and before that she was a classical critic for The Guardian and The Herald. She’s a writer and presenter I always want to hear from, bringing refreshing insights, lilting tones and deep knowledge to her work. In 2022, she published her first book, Sound Within Sound, which puts 10 musicians centre-stage who have historically been pushed to the sidelines. It takes us from microtonal visions in Mexico to unrelenting dissonances in Russia, from meeting a 93-year-old Ethiopian pianist, Emahoy Tsegué-Mariam Guèbru, to exploring the ‘sparse and mercurial, spiritual and grounded, narrative and abstract’ music of Eliane Radigue. It’s an ear-opening, mind-expanding read.

Last year, Sound Within Sound was nominated for the Royal Philharmonic Society Awards – and around that time I caught up with Kate on Zoom. I just want to flag that timing, as her book choices are a snapshot of what she was listening to back then. Perhaps this year, she’d have named three entirely different pieces of music writing. But they are wonderful, evergreen choices, which have sent me scurrying off to the library. And this summer, the Southbank Centre is putting on a series of concerts inspired by the book.

In Sound Within Sound, you write about being obsessed with classical music as a child, but back then did you think writing would be a part of your life?

No, not at all. I loved reading and I did read a lot, but I think not exceptionally. I liked writing and I loved my English classes. I would obsess over making my essays read well to the point where I’d be trying to finesse the wording of a paragraph at midnight. I cared about words. I was lucky to have certain teachers who sparked that. I’m also dyslexic. I’m a slow reader and I get confused with numbers – which frankly on air can be a nightmare. I have to hear everything in my mind when I’m reading, so I hear the sound of sentences musically, I think. Everything has a sonic quality to it. I wonder if it’s part of the dyslexia as everything is sounded in my head. Maybe there is a connection between musicality and words.

How did your career as a writer develop?

The writing started when I absolutely blagged my way into a job as a music critic, winging it as an undergraduate at university. I was waitressing and it was exhausting and I needed another job. I had a friend who worked for the Montreal Gazette and they needed somebody to be a music critic that summer. I was so gung-ho, and I was sent off to review something and I remember the editor’s response was ‘this is going to need some work’. But he sent me back for another one – and that’s how you start.

It slowly dawned on me that there was more about it than just speaking your mind. All the big journalistic questions and the ethics of music journalism – don’t write about your friends, know what you’re talking about, consider the context – dawned on me as I was doing the job. Eventually I decided I needed to get a bit more serious and went and did a master’s in musicology.

I also did copy-editing and that was super-useful. I think anyone who wants to work as a journalist should also get their hands dirty doing copy-editing. Working on the news pages of a daily newspaper, pulling stories off the wire, all that kind of stuff. I would see the way the stories were structured so that all the crucial information was in the first couple of sentences. It teaches you not to be precious and to be direct and functional with language. It was good to get that hands on training with words.

You’ve been a music critic, you’re now a broadcaster, and Sound Within Sound has taken you into the realm of non-fiction. How different is it writing for those various mediums and what you have learned in that journey?

I hate to think of what I started out writing! It was within the early internet era… I’ve not done the search and I don’t mean to. But if I think back to those early days, I’ve now learned about ways of saying things. I felt back then that I needed to not hold back at all. I knew what I thought and I felt there was a duty of a critic to say it like it was. I care so much about the art and the music that it deserves rigorous responses. If I loved something I would go for it, and if I hated it I would go for it. I now think there’s ways of making a point with less swagger. Subtlety is a thing that comes. That’s my main reflection.

I’m not a critic any more so I have the real privilege of being able to choose what I write about and basically being a champion, which I don’t think is the role of the critic. Being on the radio I sometimes have to present stuff I think’s bad and that’s frustrating but mainly I can gloss over it and move on, and give my energy to the stuff I love. My book is an absolute labour of love. I make no apologies for being very passionate about the subjects I’ve chosen.

You say at the start of your book that you wrote it out of love and anger. By the end did you feel more love and less anger?

Maybe both, actually. So much love, because every time I lost confidence in writing which was loads, I had to keep questioning why I was doing it. I kept being convinced these ten composers were fun to write about and they were worthwhile stories. No matter how unsure I was about other aspects of my writing, I thought those stories were really worth telling.

What I fed on was the conversations I had with people who knew about these composers. In that sense I’m definitely a journalist not an academic. I was very upfront about finding the people who could give me all the information, who had done the lifetime’s work in that field. When you encounter people who have such a wealth of knowledge and experience and are willing to share, you come away with utter gratitude and inspiration.

Did I also come away with more anger? A little bit, in some cases. For example, I spoke to a musicologist in Brazil who sent me everything on the composers of the 1960s and everything that was going on in that scene. He also talked a lot about how frustrated he is with the way music history is represented – and ‘definitive accounts’ of music history that devote one sentence to South America. How can such books claim to represent the world when the entire southern hemisphere is basically ignored? I kept encountering that attitude. In the Philippines, you know, somebody like José Maceda is celebrated and well known and no one here has a clue. That’s on us.

It went both ways. I felt incredibly inspired by the things I learned, but the more you learn, the more you realise that we’re all missing out.

When I look back at my musical education – which included undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in music and musicology – I realise how partial it was in that sense…

I hope that that’s changing. I think there are places that are getting on board with the idea that there’s a bigger world out there. But then they aren’t. My niece is studying jazz at the Amsterdam conservatory, and there’s no female jazz composer on the whole of their four-year curriculum. When I was writing this book, I was worrying I was five years too late with it, but then things like that would keep happening.

It definitely earns its space, as an important story that hadn’t been written.

The music industry has been confronting these big questions so the groundwork had started to happen anyway. I could look at the more nuanced angles – it’s not just about numbers and representation, it’s the more subtle and interesting conversations around how do we listen? What is the performance practice? You don’t just bung a piece by a woman in a programme and say you’re done.

The love and passion comes through in the blend you create of the travel writing, the interviews, the glimpses of you as a person we get in there…

I’m glad you think so because I did think a lot about the subjectivity and of being very clear that I don’t think it’s possible to write a definitive history. That’s been part of the problem of the so-called definitive histories which are very black and white about who gets in and who gets out. I’ve put my money where my mouth is. I’m discovering too and this is just ten composers – not my top ten. I hate that obsession with hierarchy.

Having worked on a classical music magazine editorial team, I’ve been involved with editing those top ten lists. The format is a real magazine staple, often for good reasons, but it has its downsides…

I had to do something recently where they wanted the top ten female composers and I thought, but there are 100 others! So that’s part of why I put myself in the narrative. A lot of editors and publishers I spoke to were saying to put myself into the book, and I worried about that. Because I wonder whether it’s something women get told to do. Men can be authoritative, women have to be emotional and subjective. But on reflection I think it does make it easier to approach and – granted – some of the music’s weird and difficult, so hopefully it feels like there’s someone there alongside you.

Let’s turn to your reading choices. What have you chosen first?

Sound on Sound by Kate Molleson

Faber & Faber (2022)

Toy Fight: A Boyhood by Don Paterson

Faber & Faber (2023)

This is a memoir by Don Paterson, a beautiful poet from Dundee. He’s one of the most celebrated poets in the UK, a professor of poetry at St Andrews, and he’s won the TS Eliot prize twice. He’s written beautiful ‘versions’, he calls them, not translations, of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. He’s a lyrical and beautiful poet and in person terrifying, I find, very gruff. [Molleson interviewed Patterson for Radio 3’s Music Matters last year.]

It’s a hilarious, funny memoir about growing up in the 1960s and 1970s in a council estate. But what’s really weird about it is that Paterson doesn’t talk about poetry at all. He’s absolutely obsessed with music. His first career was as a free jazz guitarist, and at the end of the book he’s heading off to London to become a jazz musician. He’s a poet writing about his love of music and about his dad, who was a really good guitarist and founded the Dundee Folk Club. Paterson was immersed in that world and all the great folk luminaries coming to Dundee. He was one of those musicians who do that thing in their teenage years when they live and breathe their instrument – there’s that obsessiveness. He has such a fun way of describing music that he loves, with great language. It’s really refreshing. It’s not ‘music writing’ but it is passionate writing about music.

Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens

Pan MacMillan (2023)

This second one is a fantastic novel. It’s a love story of Chopin and George Sand and the completely disastrous trip they took to Mallorca. They are staying in a monastery, where there’s a ghost who becomes very intrigued by this strange couple. It’s spare, spacious and quiet writing, so unforced.

Stevens has painted a picture of Chopin which is admittedly fictional – she’s made him a quite doleful and pathetic character, very sorry for himself and quite whingey, and he has this difficult relationship with George Sand’s kids. But then there’s also this miraculous music that comes out. Chopin transforms when he’s in the act of composing. Nell Stevens plays the piano, I think, and I love the way she talks about Chopin composing in Mallorca. It’s changed the way I think about those pieces now. She’s made such an evocative world around them.

I like the way she treats these characters without veneration. Chopin is struggling because he can’t get his fancy piano and he’s got a crappy upright. And he’s writing the Raindrop Prelude and it’s pouring with rain, so it’s vividly evocative. I think a lot of people are going to come at this novel who aren’t musicians and fall in love with this music.

Igor Stravinsky by Jonathan Cross

Reaktion Books (2015)

I come back to this book all the time. Jonathan Cross is so open and generous with his intellect. I think that’s the way forward with music writing. This book is 200 pages, really beautiful, written with a light touch but it has everything you need to know. When I’m presenting something – recently it was the Symphony of Psalms and Symphonies of Winds – and I need to remind myself of the essence of the music. In a radio link, you’ve got 45 seconds to get across what Stravinsky was trying to do with neo-classicism. The important thing isn’t the technical aspect, date or instrumentation – there’s something bigger. Cross gets across in very few words the big, exciting, gamechanging points.

The chapter on neo-classicism is wonderful because it talks about why Stravinsky’s obsession with the past actually goes back to his homesickness and his rootedness in Russia, and to him as an exile, always yearning. There’s something about being able to crystallise the key essential details of the story that are going to capture somebody’s imagination, and then putting that into simple and exciting language. Somebody said that to me the other day: radio is all about big picture and one key detail. That is true.

I have a huge respect for Cross. He’s written a book about Tristan Murail, but only in French at the moment, but I’m looking forward to reading that as I’m sure the way he’ll write about spectralism wil be similar. He’ll give us the bigger picture, the importance of it all. And I’m sure it’ll change the way people think.

Sound Within Sound is published by Faber & Faber