Canberra-born musician and poet Matthew McDonald has established deep roots in Berlin over the past 26 years. As principal double bassist of the Berliner Philharmoniker and founder of online magazine berlin lit, music and poetry are recurring melodies in his life. Released in February, his ekphrastic debut collection, Gran Partita, encapsulates those motifs con anima. We talked to Matthew about humour, failure, hours lost in writing flow and orchestral murmuration – all while his cats jumped on and off pianos, ivory key tinkling in the background.
How did Gran Partita come together?
I was asked to write a poem about music, ‘Octopus Rehearsal’, by composer Cathy Milliken for the Arditti Quartet’s 50th birthday. She only needed a short text, but when I started writing about music, I couldn’t stop. A poet friend encouraged me to let more music into my poems, then it became a project, I guess. Not all the poems in the book are about music, but they’re about the pressures of performing, whether it’s on stage or off stage. I wasn’t envisioning a collection, but as I went on writing poem after poem after poem, I realised there was a common thread.
As a double bassist for the Berliner Philharmoniker, you must think about music a lot?
There’s always a melody running around my head. Music is always there, even when I’m doing something else.
There’s always a melody running around my head. Music is always there, even when I’m doing something else. It’s in the pressures, associations, travelling, the friendships you form. You can be playing something by Wagner and thinking about breakfast at the same time. I wanted to include music in my poems in a way that wasn’t just describing music but really in the way poets let in nature, mythology or smells and tastes, you know? For everyone, music is there all the time. People have this immediate emotional response to songs, particularly songs you grow up with in your teens, like nothing else. In the summer, some of us take weeks off playing. But even when we’re not doing it, it’s a response to doing it all the time.
The name of your collection is after a serenade by Mozart. Why that choice of title? Why that piece of music?
I’d been playing Gran Partita with the Australian World Orchestra. It came from a mixture of being back home, playing the piece and a few things that happened – like in one hall, the air conditioning didn’t work. Then there were two words in a review that I was responding to: “high professionalism”. I really had no idea what that meant. The poems started off silly, talking about mason jars and Mozart, and then ended up becoming an elegy, which surprised me. The collection was very long, so I ordered it into seven movements, like Gran Partita by Mozart is in seven movements, then the larger structure is almost like a Russian doll of Gran Partitas, because there are the poems, then there’s the piece, then there’s the book itself. But I don’t think it’s about music; music is a launching pad for other feelings.
What’s the story behind the cover?
It’s a picture I took on tour in America somewhere between Ann Arbor and Chicago. It’s this tube man smiling away, bent half back by the wind in grim weather. I like the title in combination with that image because the image undercuts the pomposity of the title. The tube man sums up the spirit of failure: things not working out or you’re not sure if it’s going to work out – those kind of neurotic emotions. But you keep going anyway. I’m very grateful and I know theoretically I’m doing well, but the fear of screwing it all up is a motivating factor I think we all live with. Sorry… my cat is playing piano in the background.
Even the cats have musical talent in your house! So either you’re anxious about not being successful or you become successful and grow fearful of losing it?
Yeah, and it’s hard to find honest writing from classical musicians. You read interviews in magazines that always sound so… as if everything’s great: ‘my mother and father were musicians and I had a great teacher from an early age…’ All you read about is hard work and success. But there’s a whole anxious side to music. We don’t talk about aches and pains and nerves and fear. We don’t really want it in the room.
You must feel like you’re part of some kind of collective mind as an orchestra. So maybe you don’t want to affect the group with your personal issues?
‘Octopus Rehearsal’ is about that. It’s about a string quartet. It’s kind of childish, really, but the octopus is a single organism with multiple limbs. I include a quote at the beginning of the poem from Gerald Edelman [via Oliver Sacks]. I’ve got it right here:
“Think, if you had a hundred thousand wires randomly connecting four string quartet players and that signals were going back and forth in all kinds of hidden ways, that’s how the maps of the brain work by re-entry.”
Imagine a quartet, when it’s really working, as a collection of four brains made into one giant brain. That poem goes into the hive mind of a quartet, but also the individual anxieties and thoughts happening at the same time. With an orchestra, you’ve got that times 20. Then there’s a wonderful feeling on stage where you’re all connected in breath and judging the timing, judging the silence, as well as non-musical things that inform the decisions of 100 people on stage. Those moments are miraculous.
Many of your poems are funny, and reviews often describe the collection as such. What role do humour and lightness play in your poetry?
I don’t trust writing that isn’t on occassion at least a little bit funny.
As an Australian, I’m incredibly scared of being seen as pretentious. The Brits are also masters of it; when something’s getting a bit too high brow or emotional, you deflect it with a joke. I do that in life all the time. I’ll start talking about something difficult then say some flippant aside to get out of it. The more I think about it, I see that humour is saying: this is too much, actually. I used to think that someone is flippantly evading the topic – or I used to think it of myself – but humour is its own statement. There are serious and earnest moments, but we all go through life laughing and enjoying laughing; it’s one of the ways we survive as human beings. To exclude it from writing is a real shame. I don’t trust writing that isn’t, on occasion, at least a little bit funny.
Do you have any funny writers in mind?
Anne Carson. I mean, it’s amazing how she can be so erudite and deep and funny at the same time. I find that mixture so exhilarating. She’s a role model of how to wear something obscure a bit lightly. The way she can access her incredible knowledge and make it just seem like we’re all as smart as her; that’s an incredible trick she plays. Tomas Tranströmer is a big influence, too. In fact, there’s one poem in the book where I talk about plagiarising Tranströmer… accidentally! I mean, I’m not sure if I did or not. I convinced myself I’d never read any of Tranströmer’s poems before I wrote my thing. But I’m not sure. If you asked me to tell you what happened in the book I just read, I would find it difficult. But years later, I discover, oh no, it does stay in there, in the subconscious.
I wonder if you’re so influenced by the same things that it led to the same outcome?
Well, that’s the conclusion I make to justify plagiarising someone, yes. Influence is really interesting. In music, it’s really the way we learn – by copying. Eventually, you try to do your own thing, but the bulk of the learning is purely copying. It helps us learn a sense of taste and voice. I think it’s great. In the old days, people copied without any shame. Now it’s much more frowned upon. But I think it’s a tribute.
You founded the online poetry magazine berlin lit. How did that come about?
Writing poems is not something you can do for eight hours a day. They come, and when they come, you work intensely on them. So I wanted to be busy with poetry in another way. I was fooling around with an app, seeing if I could design a website. Very, very simple. I can barely manage emails. But somehow I came up with this design, then a week later, I announced it. Now I just did the 10th issue. I really love doing it. It’s an incredible amount of work. The last one, we had about 1,000 submissions. There are so many good poems that I reject because it doesn’t fit in with the flavour, or there’s another one that’s too similar. I really hate sending rejections, because it’s rare that I don’t like a poem. It’s unfortunately necessary, because I can’t publish 1,000 poems.
Are you very involved in Berlin’s literary scene?
I wouldn’t say I’m involved at all. I’ve done all this on my lonesome. It’s all been very solitary and I really don’t mind that it was happening in my own little vacuum. The people reading my book, that’s the literary community. And I love it, with the online magazine, that people can read it anywhere in the world. I mean, sometimes I think the scene in anything can be kind of misleading. Often, the people who are really doing stuff are busy working… Oh god, the cat just fell off the piano.
I know what you mean. Ultimately, you’ve just got to sit down and write.
You know, performing on stage is a huge adrenaline rush, but writing, when you’re in the middle of something that you think is great, in that moment, it’s a similar kind of rush. I’ve lost hours in that rush. That’s what we’re all looking for – how it feels in that moment of writing. It’s not even about having written, but the actual moment of writing, when you’re so in it and you like it. I’m always hunting that feeling. Practicing an instrument never felt like that to me. It can be enjoyable. I lose time. But that rush of writing… God, I love it. And if that piece of writing turns out any good, even better – but whatever.
You can find Gran Partita online and throughout bookshops in Berlin.
