Over the last – maybe – nine months, although until now not expressed on the page, many thoughts have popped into my head; sometimes of the armchair amateur philosophical kind, sometimes just memories from soon after the cradle onwards. It is only because I am persuaded that they will be of some interest that I embark on this essay.
It may be that I simply spout the first thing that comes to mind, with the result that will perhaps remind the reader of the ramblings of the late Immanuel Kant mixed with the pseudo-mots justes of PG Wodehouse, and the rest every now and then sprinkled with a spot of Michael Coren. Kant is good value if what he is driving at is explained carefully, and Wodehouse was the funniest writer ever. Any writer who is a member of the multi-talented and entertaining Coren family deserves the greatest respect.
Nevertheless, I shall probably not mention any of the above in what follows.
Unless they do pop into my head of course. Let us see.
Life spent mostly on one’s own can be riddled with frequent reminders of one’s general ignorance and incompetence. In between doubts, sometimes I can cope pretty well, by relying on the odd phone call, or coffee visitor and just about keeping up with the a) ironing, b) housework and c) necessary phone-calling and emails. Sometimes however it can be sightly hellish; a situation sometimes preluded by a sleepless night. Although bowdlerising The Sound of Music by quoting the inimitable Ted Chance, ‘The Pills have Arrived’, sadly I must not take them more than twice a week.
In these cases, occasionally all hell does indeed break loose; otherwise, nothing does, because a, b, and even on occasion c are unable to feature without a lot of strength of mind and sinew stiffening. I do an exercise class every week — which takes care of Friday mornings — but the muscular memory of the sinews in question is in forgetful and rebellious mood these days. It does happen that one starts to recover at about 2pm, though.
Indeed, the recent bout of warm weather has taken what little remaining joie de vivre and espièglerie from the sinews in question.
The worst and most annoying aspect of my largely self-induced predicament is the mood that descends on me after a bad night. They say that the opposite of depression is not happiness but expression. In other words, creativity. One good thing that has happened to me very recently, something that has shown me just how lucky I am and how little justification I had for complaining, has been demonstrated to me very succinctly about a week ago. On successive days, I had a visit from three colleagues, all much younger than I. Coincidentally, their individual experience over the last few years has been not only of having to show super-human courage in recovering from nasty medical conditions, but also to give pleasure to old codgers like me. During the visit of one, I had a call from another close friend — again half my age — who is undergoing treatment for another distressing condition, albeit one that I have no doubt he will get round in time. I am also confident that, by dint of their unusual degree of mental stamina, British phlegm, stickability and humour, they will all prevail. I have the utmost respect for them. And I delight in their company.
Added to these visits, the other day I heard (both from a wise member of my family, and from something I read somewhere) that the two most important words in our life are both the state of ‘being’ and, simply, ‘love’; certainly not ‘happiness’. Then, the next day, l learnt that I ought to start being creative and write these thoughts down. I stopped feeling so sorry for myself, and it made me blow the dust off the iMac.
Moreover, it reminded me that another wise man once told me that I always had a choice. It was just up to me to make it.
Just the act of writing makes one remember things. Like the famous musician and soloist, sadly no longer with us, who told me years ago that, for the previous twenty-five years, whenever he was on the platform or better still the once wireless and then radio, when tuning to the oboe, he always played three mf e”s. These were intended for any previous girlfriend he had had in the past, who happened to be listening. Over the years, each one — and there were many — had been assured that when they identified these three notes in his tune-up, it would tell them that he was playing for them. And only them. I liked that, and I’m sure they all did too. It’s one definition of love.
Recently, our thoughts, whether positive and outward-looking or inwardly possibly negatively focused, have been waylaid by the Olympics on the TV. I had forgotten how boring it all was, except a few of the gymnastics routines. If only they had a Shove Ha’penny event. I remember fellow Covent Garden first horn Tony Tunstall telling me, when he introduced the skill to me, that my stance should be that of a relaxed guardsman after an overindulgent Mess dinner; tie loosened, one hand in pocket, slightly slouched and with a supercilious look on his face. I became quite good at it.
I suppose that nearly everyone has a television these days. I know of only two that don’t. I wish I understood sports-talk. The commentators’ (those that comment for money) cue cards hold an enormous amount of, to the TV addict, worthless material, and some of the hype is nauseating. Descriptions from the competitors of how winning ‘makes them feel’ must be either a therapist’s dream or more probably their nightmare.
When the victorious member of, say, the Eights, or Coxed Fours, says, ‘I was totally focused on trusting the process’, this ‘process’, in whatever form it is applied to a particular discipline, is a tried and tested training strategy. But as a reaction from an apparently normal human being to a question from another apparently normal human being it bewilders me. Imagine asking students how they got on in their audition, and their saying ‘Oh I just trusted the process’. Not half as informative as reassuring us that in the first movement of Strauss 1, they didn’t split either high B-flat by very much.
This may all be something to do with the fact that the skill of running faster than anyone else is rather different from the feelings and emotions of a performing artist. The first doesn’t matter (even in the long run) but the second is vitally important. Even when — and especially if — the artist when playing their instrument are not actually performing in front of anyone at the time.
And talking of hype, the short form of hyperbole, we — I am no exception — tend to describe things and events in an overblown way, often a poor way of making our point. As just one example, we use the word Perfect too much.
We all know something else that the same wise man told me as well — that artistic perfection is unattainable. How often do we talk of a ‘perfect’ sunset, ‘perfect’ beauty, or a ‘perfect’ meal, concert or evening with friends? Could not the meal have been just as perfectly tasty using different ingredients, for instance? How do we judge all the other perfects that I have instanced without having experienced them all? However, I have to say the words ‘perfect storm’ seem to be strangely meaningful.
By the bye, I remember once describing a meal that Mum had cooked as being beautiful. My father asked me to describe in detail which parts of it on the plate looked particularly attractive.
I think that it’s simply that our instinct — if we have high standards — is to try to achieve perfection; but we also know that we can always do better, and it’s good that we do know it.
As someone steeped in music, I consider that, my own particular definition of perfection can be defined quite broadly. Moreover, its meaning for me is purely personal, imperfect, and subjective; created for, and inside me by my own upbringing, DNA and environment.
I am quite happy to describe, unashamedly, certain pieces of music as ‘perfect’ to my ears. Generally, but not exclusively, the Bach family, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. Brahms, Schumann and Elgar tend not to spring to my thoughts immediately. With this in mind, when I foolishly ask my friends to agree with my opinion on the slightly lesser-known compositions of other composers, I know perfectly well that the chances of their agreeing with me is remote. The curling of a mental lip is more usual. On occasion, an eyebrow may raise.
Let’s have a go, however. Out of the hundreds I could mention, I would perhaps cite Grieg’s first Norwegian Dance, Dohnányi’s Sinfonia Concertante for ‘cello and Orchestra, John Ireland’s Holy Boy, and Othmar Schoeck’s Horn Concerto. Honestly, these four just come to mind at this moment. Tomorrow it will be four others.
Over the years, my friends have been bored to tears listening to my preferences. One composer in particular, now dead nearly a hundred years, whose garden terrace near Fontainebleau I have stood on, stands pre-eminent. In his garden, I picked some bay leaves from an old tree he must have known soon after the beginning of the last century. Having added them to a very ordinary beef stew when I got home, it tasted neither perfect nor beautiful. But his music remains.
What it boils down to is the fact that our own ideal in the perception of beauty is the only one that matters. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ Keats had a point.
Without wishing to be too didactic, when we pick up our instrument to play, we have to do three things, none of which is of the slightest use without the others.
The first is to admit we know very little. Then to practise sufficiently long and sensibly to learn that by doing so we will be able to fulfill and satisfy ourselves with our sound, musicality and general skill, while playing the notes mostly correctly. The third is to know as much as we can about the music we are about to play. But not necessarily in an analytical way. When we look at it on the page, we can just form a complete concept of what we, in our innocence, are going to achieve. In other words, we realise fully — before we start — what we are going to do and how we are going to do it. Not to try to achieve, but actually to achieve technically and musically. These thoughts can of course be parcelled together as an ideal, something devoutly to be wished. Here we must indeed trust the process.
These concepts are allowed to mature and alter as we gain intuition, experience and confidence. Naturally, we are all sometimes prone to being a little liberal with the truth as we see it. When I didn’t catch a fish, it was the weather’s fault (although, of course, it was not).
And in horn playing we want to have complete faith in the instrument we are playing on. But we can only trust it with some confidence if we acknowledge the natural waywardness of its harmonic series and the habit of some partials being more out of tune in one octave, and on one instrument, than in another. Because of our fallibility as human beings, however sentient we are, we learn that we are allowed to play an A’’ on the sharp side on the B-flat side (most people know why it’s sharp). These things we will learn and absorb, because we learn to understand the reasons for them.
It’s just another reminder of accepting the impossibility of perfection. I think it can be boiled down to the important realisation that although they cost a lot, machines like horns don’t themselves tell the truth — they are incapable of doing so. It is the beauty of the sound and the imagination of the players that tell their own truth. The instrument is a mere conduit. That Grecian Urn gets everywhere.
When we read the score of or listen to Mozart’s 39th Symphony few would surely disagree with us that it is a thing of complete beauty. Just as the next two are. In the case of No. 39, my dad loved it, and shared with my untrained mind the first inklings of what sonata form (of numerous music books and of ABRSM Grade VIII Theory fame) was. He pointed out two things though; he told me that the slow movement does not have a development section, but also that, strangely, nor does the last movement contain a second subject. It dashes straight into its development section. Almost as if W. A. M was so inspired by the first tune he’d come up with that he didn’t bother with another one. You can’t improve on perfection — whether it exists or not.
Dad did a stint of lecturing on Form and Harmony at what was at that time called the Birmingham and Midland Institute. In the Hallé I played for a couple of years on a mouthpiece owned by the Institute’s former president, Sir Granville Bantock. I’d started on his piston horn when I was ten, and played on it for three years, until I left my first school. Seven years after that, though, I was still using the Hawkes mouthpiece which I had filched and still have. I should give it back really, to join the horn in its glass case. I’d clean it first, of course.
As regards artistic standards, my father was reassuring and generous in his praise when it was warranted, but he kept it simple, and would just say ‘Well done, old boy’. That’s all you need, really. As a church organist, Dad was broadly educated, and exceptionally musically informed. But above all, highly intuitive. The harmony of his organ improvisations was inspired. Three musical incidents I remember from my early teens. The first was a recording we had at home of Cyril Smith playing Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto. Cyril Smith was one of dad’s three favourite pianists. Even after he lost one of his arms. Cyril Smith, that is. The other two were Kathleen Long and latterly, the young Imogen Cooper, whose Mozart and Schubert he considered unmatched.
But back to Rachmaninov. Dad played the opening of the recording to me and I rather cockily commented, ‘Wasn’t the piano F (the second note of the theme) a tiny bit sharp?’ He replied (if I remember correctly), ‘There are two things to consider. Because it’s a minor key, you think that the F, being a minor third above the D should be sad and flat-sounding note. But it is not that interval that should sound flat. It is the major third above it – F to A – that is the sad one. So, in D minor, the piano-tuner has to make sure he gets it right – by faintly sharpening the interval of a minor third, so that in fact the major third above it can sound sad’. I remember distinctly where we were standing, in the front room, when he said this.
On another occasion he told me to listen to the double-bass parts in the slow movements of symphonies and how the best at doing this was Brahms, who gave the instrument lovely melodic lines of music to play. He had Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra’s version of the Fourth Symphony out on loan from the library for a long time. So long indeed that he had to use a fair proportion of the pocket money that mum gave him to spend each week (true) to pay the overdue fine. He was a most generous individual, but partly owing to his enforced care with his money (unless he was offered a pint of course), he always confined himself to drinking ‘halves’ in the Yorkshire House pub opposite the church, and making them last (‘Thirsting after righteousness’, he called it). In that and other hostelries he picked up most of his stories., and nearly all his closest friends. Didn’t we all?
He told me that when he was working in Chester Cathedral during the war, he used to love the smile that appeared on the faces of the men in the choir, when the last verse of the hymn reached the words ‘….the road that leads me to the Lamb’. (‘The Olde Lamb’ is a hostelry near the Cathedral.)
I now remember mentioning P G Wodehouse; there are hundreds of quotable lines in his stories, and as I was planning a September day’s fishing yesterday, some lines from a Jeeves and Wooster story came to me.
Bertie Wooster meets his manservant on the terrace on a sunny early morning:
‘The lark’s on the wing, and the snail’s on the thorn, eh, Jeeves’
‘You know your Browning, Sir’
‘Oh, am I?’
I feel blessed that each one of my incredibly talented children and grandchildren will cast a considerably more benevolent shadow over humanity than I ever have done. This is especially comforting because, except for in our own particular little bubble so many parts of the world seem to be in foment at the moment. Near my home there is little rioting in the streets as yet, just the odd raised voice late at night. What would it take for the leaders of the world, free or otherwise, to come to a meeting of minds as to the way things — poverty, global warming, right- and left-wing extremism, can be righted? Maybe they should all sit down and listen to Mozart 39.
We are reliably told that poverty and the evil that men do will always be with us. This will be true until we finally first admit how ignorant we all are, and then understand the nature of our and other’s minds, until we respect rather than fear others’ differences. We ought to acknowledge the futility of aggression as a means of persuasion. And couple it with a dash of selflessness and, usefully, humour. Education, education, education. Philosophy, Politics, Economics and Horn playing. All equally important.
