One aspect of getting on a bit and having time to think has led me, inevitably, to look back and review carefully selected areas of my life. Many good friends are involved. For example, Tony Tunstall started at the Royal Opera House in 1949 as 3rd horn and quickly became the Principal horn. His interests were wide, to say the least. I telephoned him on his 91st birthday and asked him whether he could say that he’d enjoyed his time in the Opera House, and life generally. He laughed and said ‘Well, Jules, all I’ve really done is more or less lurch from one c***-up to the next’. I know exactly what he meant. He threw himself head-first into life with gusto.
He was a highly intelligent and creative character. The creativity was abundantly evident in his horn-playing, but he told me that after his experiences in the Royal Navy during the war, he treated the part of his life devoted to music as a game that merely enabled him to earn enough money to fund his other activities. In the canteen one day, a few weeks after I’d joined the orchestra (he’d given me a pineapple as a welcome gift from the horn section), I found myself describing to him, at some length, the two-year life of the mayfly in as much detail as I knew, and at the end, he looked up and said ‘Now there’s something that’s really interesting’. And he meant it. He kept reminding me about the incident for years, on occasions when life seemed to be getting in the way.
The point about him is that he read a lot, and was an all-round man who had opinions on everything you could mention. We may not often think about ‘Life’ very often, but when we find ourselves trying to identify the things in life that really matter, it doesn’t always have to be only about family relationships and our professional life that we turn to in our thoughts. For some indeed it could be a variation on the life cycle of Ephemeroptera that seizes our mind.
We are usually so busy getting on with the tasks that confront us from morning to night, even if it’s just eating or going to work, the last thing we do is merely think. When I make myself sit down and ponder ‘Life’ and the enormity of global problems that confront us these days, I find it difficult to consider them seriously, because I’m insufficiently qualified and informed. I’m not qualified even to scratch the surface. My reading has not been properly varied. But I do retain a modicum of the moral and ethical principles that were instilled in me in my ‘yoof’. Looking back, the question I am now facing and need to answer is whether all or any of these ways of thinking are still relevant and valid today.
In the peroration at the end of this general meander, the point of the first ‘funny’ conductor story is a very mild case in point. Is it that important to polish one’s shoes vigorously before a concert these days? Some might argue that doing so heightens the sensation of the importance of the event involved, and subliminally makes one try harder. I’m not sure about that; I once played the Mozart Horn Quintet with – unbeknownst to me – the entire back of my tails covered in green stains, gathered in the long grass while resting on my back before the concert.
Talking of clothes and their presentation to the gaze of the general public, my father told me that not only did one not go to the cinema on Sundays, but also that I should never tuck my pullover into my trousers, whether in the cinema or not.
I can now reveal that there was a clothing-related incident in my kindergarten school in Repton, Derbyshire, one morning. St Wystan’s, now established for nearly 100 years, was and still is, a very august establishment, where the Head Teacher in my day, Miss Heath, kept a caged yet talkative green parrot that was reputed to be between at least 50 and 75 years old, depending on who was telling me. On this day, I, aged four, was unmercifully teased about my underpants, dyed pink by mistake by my mother, being visible over my shorts. Talking of friends, my contemporaries at that cradle of learning were two good people, Dicky Tyack and Richard Frewer, both of whom went on to have starry careers; Dicky in trombone-playing and Richard in both architecture and singing.
My own horn lessons at a later school (where another friend introduced me to a lifelong passion for trout fishing) were overseen by an ex-bandmaster and cornet player who had served for many years in India. He recounted hair-raising tales of catching the huge mahseer in its rivers. He had spent so many years in the sun that his imposing face looked like a south-facing wall. His tried and possibly un-tested method for not splitting notes was to tongue harder.
Today marks the 40th anniversary of the first appearance of the mobile phone. So much has happened in the last four or five decades, since the invention of the internet and this. The spread of instant news and ‘information’, whether fake or real, with which we are bombarded has created a world in which our thoughts and opinions – if we have them – are continually being influenced on all sides by the thoughts and opinions of others. Moreover, if one of these self-promoting influencers has one solution to a problem, one only has to scroll down and find another with the opposite view. I remember, in the days when I used to read various newspapers of different hues, I would turn to the Leader pages of each, and believe uncritically what was being said. First, I would trust what the Guardian said, only, later in the day, to have my mind redirected sharply toward the equally persuasive thoughts of the one in the Telegraph. I suppose that in the pub later I would trot one or the other out depending on what I felt my audience was more sympathetic to. That way I must have felt I could score some dubious points.
I suppose that even then I would sometimes form opinions if I felt they made sense to me. But I was not too good at sticking my head above the intellectual parapet, however low it might, in my case, be. The one exception, which I now express fearlessly, is the fact that I simply know that the only safe way to eat a hamburger, or bacon-and-egg bap – with or without contents that are locally sauced – is upside down. The bap, that is, not the eater. I will not be persuaded otherwise.
So, now, I try not to believe instinctively everything I read whether in the Times or the Mirror unless it emanates from someone whom I know I can trust completely. But how do I know who to trust completely? They are all cleverer than I am.
What to believe leads me, inevitably, to music. If I give someone advice on a horn-playing issue, a succession of consequences have to follow. To start with, the student has to believe (trust) that I completely believe in what I am saying. So, of course, I too must believe it, and then be persuasive. The student now has what he or she needs to go home and test my advice in detail, and at length. This sounds obvious and doable, but the process of testing my ideas will involve mental and probably physical stamina. And, quite naturally, a possible relapse into boredom. This is because it will also take time – maybe more than they are used to spending on a task of this nature. Maybe not much time, but, equally, maybe a lot of time. The results depend on the difficulty of the task and the quality of the time spent, however much.
The teacher will be involved in this process too. Our task in every lesson is, again, not only to be interesting and persuasive but also to be enthusiastically optimistic about the outcomes. Nonetheless, we need also to be open and similarly enthusiastic and persuasive about trying something else, especially if, despite the work put in, we both have to re-think. Not for nothing does Matthew Syed talk about a period of ten years spent perfecting a process of learning. He talks of the best figure skaters as being the ones that have fallen over the most. The falls result in much time spent learning. And the time involved results in many, but ever fewer, falls. There can be no horn player who has not heard the words ‘The more mistakes you make, the better you will be’. In order to make and learn how to then prevent those mistakes, time is required.
Having said that, I have found time and time again, that if the work and the hours have been put in, the actual good outcomes emerge anyway, whether the details are always followed exactly or not, sometimes even emerging, as it were, from a different direction. It is not always the ‘facts’ or ‘details’ that matter anyway. What works best is the positive way students think, and the way teachers approach their own work.Not onlymentally and physically but all the time in a clearly sensible and humane way. Nevertheless, we need to keep our empathetic feet firmly on the ground, so that, in the end, ‘they know’ that ‘we know’ that ‘they’ know. Between student and teacher, it is this eventually unarticulated, yet trusting, interaction that is the best influencer in helping the player to learn and work thoughtfully.
Strangely enough, however, I once had a rather fraught discussion on the preceding matter with a player and teacher that I respect highly. I don’t think my argument was sufficiently persuasive in those days, so I was hoisted by my own petard. I now suspect that now my ideas are thought out somewhat more clearly.
The trouble is that in our youth, in many respects many of our elders were better, had we but known it. Partly precisely because they were elders, and moreover experienced, through trying things out for themselves. The job of the teacher, parent, or guru (of any persuasion – there are plenty of extraordinarily dubious ones around these days) should be not to tell ‘the truth’ or give us ‘facts’. It should be to suggest, wisely, why we might spend time testing things first. In other words, how to think.
In the earlier Enlightenment days of the Age of Reason, they had the emergence of products coming out of the Industrial Revolution to play with; now it’s the Internet and the beginnings of AI and driverless cars. As I have driven a car on my own only one single time in my life, the latter might suit me better than the borrowed Triumph Herald, that I went to work in 50 years ago. It coincided with a thunderstorm, in which I while trying to avoid small children kicking balls across the road, was also vying with sundry elderly folk crossing it on Zimmer-frames, but not at Zebra crossings. It’s true.
But the point I am struggling to make is that, outside the world of horn playing and good teachers, the more information there is ‘out there‘ the less we are tempted to trust any of it, because of the number of opposing opinions there are to contend with. But equally, in some situations, the more information that is put out the more some people are instantly prepared to ‘believe’ it even if previously they had believed the opposite. And some will believe in something dangerously erroneous all their lives, regardless. A large amount of the ‘Information’ we receive is also very short on both facts and reliable data against which to test it anyway. This could, but will not, lead me into an even more boring essay on the value and types and quality of the educationthat is received in various cultures around the world.
It seems that in 2023 we have been living through a sort of modern-day Enlightenment for some years – a new ‘Age of Reason’. As in the 1700s, we are no longer supposed to believe, necessarily, anything we are told to believe by our ‘elders and betters’. Although it needs to be said that if we can rationalise it to our own satisfaction, we do still have the freedom to do so. So that, at least, is quite encouraging, except that some of the ‘information’ we receive lends dubious credence to some wild theorising and also gives us the freedom to embrace the current more blatantly wild political thought. As I was once told by a wise man, ‘You always have a choice, but whether you make the choice is up to you’.
It strikes me that the new Rationalism in the 18th century was deceptive, in that it also allowed for a considerable amount of new appreciation of both natural beauty – even Romance –and the value of Sensation with which people could now more imaginatively judge the quality of their thoughts and ambitions. The buildings, constructed with new, post-Baroque, concepts of architectural simplicity, were often designed to inspire awe in the natural beauty of the world around them. And they can still have this effect, 300 years later. The technological revolution of those days has its contemporary artistic counterparts now, three hundred years later. In other words, this time gave the freedom to explore rationality wherever it took one. This emancipation was given form by simple things – even if sometimes constructed on a mathematical (rational, again) and large scale. It inspired writers and composers to express their emotions more freely. Personally, I see the result, especially in the music of Schubert and CPE Bach. But that’s just me, being allowed to see it as objectively as my nature and nurture allow.
Ideally, musicians discover and explore their own character through their playing, so that after much practice the music-making becomes an intrinsic extension of ‘them’. Instinct turns into intuition. In musical terms, because we ‘feel’ and exist in the modern world, we can discover and appreciate a contemporary version of Mozart’s Classical form; e.g that of Oliver Knussen or Maxwell Davies. Because within its sensible framework we have the opportunity to express those sensations that, because we are human, we feel, and indeed, we must express.
If we are living in a 21st century of Reason, we should explore the human opportunities it offers. We should ignore the ugly and ill-conceived stupidity of Irrationality, and go out into the countryside and sing.
Talking of singing in the open air, reminds me that when, at the ROH, I was given the chance to play Siegfried’s Long Call in Act 2, Scene 2 of the opera. Our hero was personified by that wonderful singer Alberto Remedios. He had only previously sung the part in English as he was a star at the English National Opera, so had to learn the German words phonetically, something he never quite managed. But like all good professionals, he just went on singing anyway. After I had finished the call, in the dress rehearsal, I looked around at Colin Davis the conductor, who gave me the thumbs-up, which being interpreted said I could go home. Further back, in the stalls, I saw Mauritz Sillem, the Head of Music Staff, laughing uncontrollably. A day or two later I asked him what had been so funny and he explained that, whereas Alberto should have been saying to the birds the following – in German:
Then hearken now to my horn.
To a wood-song then lend me thine ear,
Now let me see who comes to my call:
if comrade or friend will appear.
What he actually said was:
‘I shall sing to you through my horn, I will see who comes when I go into the woods and take all my clothes off‘.
Two of the following sociological anecdotes could not happen now, and the third should happen more often. The first is a product of the age in which it happened, and the master-servant culture has to an extent altered. Some forms of prejudice as were expressed in the second were hilarious then, but are rightly unacceptable today. It was over 60 years ago; for most, it wouldn’t be at all funny now.
But the third story is as refreshing today as it was in the mid-60s.
I’ve got Sir Arthur Bliss’s autograph somewhere. He was very grumpy giving it to me, I remember, because, although I had a scrap of paper, I didn’t have a pen. I was only thirteen though, and Biros still leaked badly in those days. He possessed a voice somewhat like that of General Montgomery addressing his troops in the desert. Nick Hill once told me that, when he played in the BSO, the orchestra came up to the Festival Hall for a concert containing music by Sir Arthur, and conducted by him. At the end of the rehearsal, he put the baton down and announced, ‘I only want two things tonight Ladies and Gentlemen – a good ‘A’ and a clean pair of shoes’.
In the Hallé, another posh-sounding maestro got to the end of a symphony and asked, ‘Are there any queries?”. Ted Kilfoyle growled from the basses,’ There’s none of them in this band!’. How we laughed.
Finally, our conductor in the Hallé, Sir John Barbirolli, was somewhat of a fanatical opera lover. Both his father and grandfather had played in the first performance of Otello in 1887 in La Scala. I remember one time, in Exeter when he told me that his hat size was exactly the same as Verdi’s, so he always wore what he called his black ‘Verdi hat’. Once, sitting on the steps outside Sofia cathedral he took it off to wipe his brow and a passing worthy put some money in it.Quite early in his career, in the 1930s, he was to conduct a large number of operas at Covent Garden and elsewhere on tour in the UK, including Die Meistersinger, and Turandot, with Eva Turner. In the Hallé we performed two un-staged Puccini operas in the Free Trade Hall. He knew every word that was sung. He mouthed them at the singers, throughout.
The only two pieces in his repertoire that he would always conduct without the score (he would close the score on the rostrum with a dramatic flourish before lifting the baton) were Carnival Romain and Die Meistersinger. At one morning rehearsal, he picked up the stick and noticed it wobbling uncontrollably in his hand. With both hands, he put it down and left the platform. Ten minutes later, he returned, wiping his mouth with his voluminous white handkerchief. He picked up the baton, saw that it was as steady as a rock, and Die Meistersinger began.
On one occasion we were rehearsing Verdi’s Forza del Destino. After JB had stopped for some reason, a player – I think it was Neville Roberts, the very fine bass trombonist – asked him whether he could outline the plot of the opera for us, so that we could better characterise the piece. JB was happy to do so, going into quite a long discourse about how Spanish Don Alvaro falls in love with Italian Leonora, daughter of the Marquis of Calatrava, leading to our hero shooting the Marquis and culminating in Leonora retreating to a monastery or possibly a nunnery. During his synopsis the orchestra naturally went back to their Telegraph crosswords and lit another cigarette – those were the days. Just as he got to the end of the plot, Martin Milner, the leader, interrupted him to announce that the orchestra was overdue for its 20-minute break. A few weeks later, we embarked on the Sicilian Vespers overture. Once again, in a pause soon after the start, someone – I think this time Syd King – enquired as to whether we might possibly play better if we knew a little of the story. Barbirolli calmly put the stick down and said ‘I’ve been caught out once before with this ruse. Italian Opera is about two things, and two things only; Dicks and Daggers. We’ll go from Letter B’.
