‘Nothing’s straightforward, I’m afraid’: An Interview with John Joubert at his Home at 63 School Road, Birmingham, 12 January 2001

Abstract

This interview with John Joubert took place shortly after I had complet ed my DPhil at Oxford, where I had written, as part of my dissertation, a chapter on Joubert’s Second Symphony (published in this journal in 1999/2000, vol. 19/20 as ‘Protesting Relevance: John Joubert and the Politics of Music’). I no longer recall the exact reason for the interview, and reading through it in 2020, I surmise that I had aimed at a conversation prompting John to talk about his life and career in broadly socio- political and aesthetic terms. Having just written about his Second Symphony, I was keenly aware of how little research had been conducted on him and his music, and I must have set up the interview with the view to conducting further research at a later stage. As the transcript shows, I was an inexperienced interviewer, with the result that the interview meanders needlessly, and stutters in quite a few places. For all his wonderful qualities – I remember him as a gentle and generous man – John’s deliberate, thoughtful, undemonstrative and unassuming speech and his restrained manner did little to infuse energy into the conversation where my questioning impeded it. Everything about his manner suggested that he believed that ‘nothing is straightforward’, as he puts it towards the end of our conversation, and he was not prone to provocation or controversial statements. At its best, the interview does provide valuable perspectives on the composer and his ideas and it is published here to mark his passing in 2019. The interview has been edited to enhance fluency and delete some redundancy.