Preface
An essay on the tricky business of writing about music.
In this piece, I indulge in a recollection of schooldays, to convey the difficulty of communicating about music. I wrote:
“The pitfalls of trying to communicate musical truths in words—and the paradoxical urge to do so—were borne in on me when I was about 10. A seemingly ancient man with a white beard came to my school one summer day, holding us truculently indoors when the cricket field beckoned. He pounded the piano for an hour or so and repeatedly groaned the single Latin word “Accende!”, a spectacle sufficiently amusing to us schoolboys for it to engender a brief imitative craze after he had left. Then we all forgot about it, and him. Twenty years later, attending a live performance of Mahler’s eighth symphony for the first time, I was bodily hurled back in my seat by the choir’s dramatic unison shout in E major at what turned out to be bar 262 of the first movement. Simultaneously there came back in a flash the memory of the old man (Sir Charles Groves, it was) at the piano. This was the musical moment he had attempted to share with 200 indifferent children on a June afternoon in the 1960s. How doomed of him to seek to convey it. How inevitable that he should try.”
More recently, I was going through some old papers, and came across a contemporaneous record of this event, in the form of my weekly letter home from Summer Fields to my parents. I had not read this account since I wrote it in 1967: “On Friday, Mr Charles Groves MBE, conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, gave us a lecture on Mahler’s 8th symphony, of all things. It was completely boring, as predicted, as he blabbered on about nothing but commas and hiccups and the fact that the 97th note in the 157th bar of the 62nd line in the bass clef of the 94th page of book 962 of the 27th movement of the 767th symphony (phew whiff!) was a crotchet. Not quite my sort of thing, to put it mildly.”
It seems that my love of music had not yet burgeoned.