Preamble: Lord Williams's School is the state comprehensive in Thame, Oxon. Robin Nelson was the music teacher at the time, and I recently stumbled across his blog in the Marlborough News - Memoirs of a Music Man. It was good read so I decided to write to him. Well, why not? The rest is fairly self-explanatory.
This all began with a simple request from a friend – please tell us something interesting about your life. She was preparing entertainment for the (first?) anniversary edition of our lockdown quiz, a Sunday night Zoom event provided to give some sort of punctuation to the week.
What thing, event, or fact about my life, might be vaguely interesting and yet not so obviously ‘me’ that it would be instantly recognisable? I went to school with Howard Goodall. How about that? He was some years older than me, the son of the Principal at Lord Bill’s in Thame, and wasn’t famous. That’ll do! But then, as always, one thing leads to another. How much older was he? When reading about Howard, his achievements and collaborations, the name Rowan Atkinson is never far away. Was he also an Old Tamensian? No. But, in the late 80s when I was working at the Post Office in Princes Risborough, I knew the Branch Manager in Thame and remember being regaled by a tale of him offering sanctuary to Mr Atkinson in the back office. Some overly enthusiastic well-wishers were being a little too exuberant for his liking!
Who else went to Thame, and whatever happened to any of my associate scholars? I have never attempted to keep in touch. It’s not my style. In my foraging around the Internet I came across this column in the Marlborough News – Memoirs of a Music Man by Robin Nelson. Cor, stone the crows! An abiding mental image is that of you lurching and swaying, highly precariously it seemed, on a canteen dinner table, conducting a performance of Carmina Burana. That and sitting in your office in the music block playing Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell very loudly. Well, you have to; it doesn’t really work sotto voce. I cannot remember why I had the keys to the music block but I assume that it was some kind of responsibility that had been thrust upon me.
When it comes to performing music, I am completely talentless. I was a violinist who couldn’t count and so spent most of my time in school orchestra performances lost, waiting for a recognisable theme to come along, one that might allow me rejoin everyone else for a while. I don’t really know why my parents wasted resources on violin and piano lessons. I think it was for their own entertainment. There were never any set objectives. And I quickly learned not to question why. The answer was always ‘because I said so. Do as you’re told!’ But that musical education, such as it was, has given me a deep and abiding love of good music and some fond memories.
My taste in music began when I was about nine years of age. My parents never listened to music. We didn’t have a TV. The radio was purely for the six o’clock news. But one day, and I still don’t know why, my father came home with a record player and three LPs. He showed me how to use it and never registered any further interest. I still have those LPs. ‘Grieg’s Greatest Hits’ – his Piano Concerto on side A and some incidental music on the other, ‘The World of Johann Strauss’ and ‘The World of Tchaikovsky’. They were well chosen for a small boy; I somehow have the feeling that the salesman might have had a lot to do with the selection. Each one had a short, yet very exciting piece that I could instantly bond with – the finale of the 1812, ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ and ‘Thunder and Lightning Polka’. I remember my gran treating me to two more albums – Symphonies 1 and 2 by Brahms. This was in response to a performance of that broad C major theme in the final movement of the first. The Mendelssohn and Bruch violin concertos featured too. And when someone bought for me a cassette player, my first purchase was Brahms’s second piano concerto. So you can imagine how peeved I was when, in a music lesson at the lower school, we had the question – how many movements are there in a concerto – I wrote as my answer ‘a piano concerto has four’ and being marked as wrong!
However, I think it was you who inspired my enduring love of Beethoven’s music. I remember you announcing to the orchestra that we were next going to work on his fifth symphony. I recall thinking ‘Oh no. We’re going to do the da-da-da-dah bit’. I was wrong (notwithstanding the fact that the entire symphony is built on that 4-note figure). We launched into that triumphant opening theme from the last movement and I was just blown away by it. I soon acquired a suitably imprinted disc of vinyl. When I heard the prelude to that theme – the dark, mysterious and brooding transition section, its dramatic crescendo and the moment that the sunlight bursts forth in all its glory – well, that has to be one of the greatest moments in all symphonic history. So although, when pressed, I declare that Sibelius is my favourite composer, Beethoven remains the foundation of all that I love in music. I wanted to be part of the choir, but it was not to be. Most choral output is religious in nature, put out at moments of religious significance. This is not appropriate for a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Fortunately most of it is sung in foreign and I now enjoy the sumptuous sounds without the message being readily apparent. Isn’t Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass wonderful, even though the title makes it sound as if it needs surgically removing?
Other memories: Peter Brown and his love of performing unaccompanied JS Bach violin pieces, and teasing him afterwards – ‘what are you going to play for us now that you have practiced your scales?’ Julian de St Croix being revered. On hearing Bartok emanating from practice rooms, deciding that Bartok was not for me, but then admitting, after a school trip to the RFH, that his Concerto for Orchestra wasn’t bad. I have come to love it.
I have now been in Scotland for five years and one thing that has struck me is how the Scots embrace their traditional music. From the dulcet tones of Julie Fowlis singing in Gaelic to some hairy old blokes giving it large with a heavy rock version of The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond, folk music is very much part of the everyday. I don’t recall that being the case in England. Folk music and Morris Men are things of which to be embarrassed! Here we have Dougie McLean, The Birks o’ Aberfeldy and the Red Hot Chilli Pipers! My musical education continues. My poor violin, having decided that it was forgotten or retired, is now being tortured once again with attempted performances of J Scott-Skinner and Niel Gow. The torture is worse for the next-door neighbour; I will never ever be a performer! In that regard I am a lost cause. But then again, if we were all performers, where would the audience come from?
Postscript: I have since been invited to joing the Old Tamensian Association. I'm not sure that Zoom cocktail parties are really my thing. I might decline.
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