REV. 2008)
When I left school at eighteen, with a three-year university scholarship under my belt, I thought I was clear about what I was going to do with my life. I was going to be a doctor—not any old common-or-garden GP or even surgeon but a public health doctor. My father’s cousin’s husband was public health officer in Dunedin, and I had accompanied him on his rounds in that quaint Victorian city and seen some of its messy underside. I was going to get my medical degree and then study for the Diploma of Public Heath, which included topics like geology, hydrology, plumbing, economics, and even, if I remember correctly, a little seismology—all to me topics of much more interest than the messy structure of people’s insides.
At that time, music was little more than an intensely practiced avocation. It was in the family, though there was very little stimulation from the dull town in which we lived. My early memories include my mother singing me to sleep with lovely Edwardian music-hall songs, and we had a gramophone—phonograph to you—a big windup acoustic HMV console model ornamented with machine-carved curlicues, and an assortment of records, 78 rpms of course, which I had the run of from an early age. When I was ill, which was often when I was a child, I used to have the big HMV beside my bed, which would be strewn with records. I can still hear one, called Herd Girl’s Dream, played by a trio of flute, violin, and harp, which at six or seven I thought the most beautiful music in all the world. I remember every note of it, though the record disappeared, as they do, more than fifty years ago.
We had other records too, album sets proudly proclaiming the “new electrical process”: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Emperor Concerto; the New World Symphony, which at age twelve or so I prided myself on being able to whistle my way through from start to finish; The Gondoliers of Gilbert and Sullivan, which my sister and I used to sing over the washing up; Schubert’s B-flat Trio; excerpts from act 3 of Tristan und Isolde; and the suite from Swan Lake (when I hear any of those longer works today I still have a kinesthetic memory in the seat of my pants of where I had to get up to turn the record over). I liked also to play some of the jazz records that my elder brother brought home from university in the late thirties in the teeth of our parents’ disapproval: some Duke Ellington, whose sound fascinated me with its fine-drawn, plangent quality, along with Nat Gonella and his Georgians and Harry Roy and his Tiger Ragamuffins (you won’t have heard of them, but they were good musicians who were trying to establish jazz in Britain in the 1930s in the face of the indifference or hostility of the middle-class-dominated BBC and entertainment industry). Our parents wouldn’t let him desecrate the big HMV in the dining room with such terrible noises so he had to listen to them in his own room on a tinny little portable. When he was in the mood he would sometimes let me come in with him and listen in, as we used to say in those days. Later, after seeing the George Gershwin biopic with Alan Alda’s father as the composer, our parents relented somewhat and the records were allowed to be brought downstairs.
There was also Paul Whiteman making a lady out of jazz, “vocal gems” from operettas, and a lot of dance records, foxtrots and quicksteps, hits of the day now forgotten with titles like “Goodnight Sweetheart” and “In a Little Gypsy Tearoom”—the word had much more innocent connotations in those days. Or maybe it didn’t—who knows?
And we had the six-foot contralto Clara Butt belting out “Land of Hope and Glory,” Gounod’s “Serenade,” black spirituals, Layton and Johnson’s “It Was a Lover and His Lass,” a few comic monologues, and one record from a four-record set—all I knew of the piece for years—of the second movement and the start of the third of Schumann’s Piano Concerto. I played and loved them all indiscriminately, blissfully unaware at that age that there was one thing called “classical music” and another called “popular music” and that one was better than the other.
Then there was the piano, which I started learning at the age of seven. It seems that my teacher, to whom I’m eternally grateful, didn’t approve of those grade examinations of the Royal Schools of Music to which my contemporaries were put, painfully learning three set pieces a year, but instead presented me with easy pieces of Grieg, Tchaikovsky, and Palmgren along with easy arrangements of popular songs (those from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves were contemporary favorites), and later Granados, Debussy, and Bartok—all moderns in those days. I remember also in my early teens triumphantly bringing him an ancient volume of Mozart sonatas that an old lady had given me, as if I’d rediscovered them all by myself—which in a way I had—and this while my contemporaries were learning their boring exam pieces and practicing scales (never in my whole life have I practiced scales) and were being taught The Robin’s Return and Blumenlied (though I later found Blumenlied for myself and played it con amore).
My mother didn’t play an instrument, although she was proud of the fact that her father, who was a printer by trade, had conducted a choral society in Wellington. I still have the baton that his choir presented to him in 1896. It’s made of polished oak and bound in silver engraved with his name and the date and weighs about half a pound. They must have been giants in those days. My father played the piano quite well and had a nice baritone voice. He loved to sing to his own accompaniment—sea songs, old popular songs, Tom Moore, and Burns; his party piece was the Cobbler’s Song from the cod-Chinese musical Chu Chin Chow, which he and my mother had seen in London in 1919 when he was there as an army dentist. He also liked to do The Holy City, although he never could quite manage the repeated triplet chords in the accompaniment. Years later, when I went to live in Catalonia, I made an arrangement of it for a friend of mine who has a magnificent tenor voice to do with the local choir. It may be an old warhorse in Anglo-Saxon countries, but it was a breathtaking novelty in Spain and for a while they couldn’t get enough of it.
As my sister and I began to get a bit good on the piano (she is still, in her eighties, a fine pianist with a string of pupils in the lovely little New Zealand country town where she has lived and brought up a family for more than fifty years), he stopped, and I never heard him sing or play in later years. I wonder if my priggish adolescent attitudes might have had something to do with it; I remember being ashamed when he played and sang in front of my intellectual school friends, and I daresay I showed it. He did, however, snap back at me once (I loved him, as did everyone, but he did have his fits of irritation) when I ridiculed a ukulele-playing British film comedian called George Formby: “I bet he practices his uke at least as hard as you practice your bloody piano.” Touché; my skills at the piano came all too easily, and at that teenaged time I was fonder of showing off to visitors (showers of wrong notes, but ah, the expression!) than I was of practicing.
My brother’s violin teacher played lunchtimes in a trio in the elegant woodpaneled restaurant of the town’s posh department store. They were scarcely audible at times over the conversations and the noise of serving and eating, but they were a treat for me (three musicians at a time were still the most that I had ever heard!), and today the sound of that despised genre, café music, all too rarely heard these days, retains a special magic, especially when heard through the noise of cutlery and plates. Years later, on my first visit to Venice, the café bands in Saint Mark’s Square brought it all back to me in a wave of intense, nostalgic joy. On occasional evenings the British Music Society would bring musicians from Wellington, and my parents and I would make our way through the darkened haberdashery department of that same department store, at four stories the tallest building in town, and up to the restaurant where the concerts were held. I haven’t the faintest recollection of what was played or sung on those occasions, but I remember the delicious feeling of being initiated at that early age into an adult society that was in some way defined by attendance at those concerts. It was around that time too that I learned the skills of sitting still and concealing boredom, during long evenings at the home of a record-collecting lecturer in the local agricultural college, while he played his records: the complete Saint Matthew Passion, it might be, or what seemed like a couple of hundred Scarlatti sonatas played by Wanda Landowska one after the other on the harpsichord, a sound I have never managed to like—all at that time as incomprehensible as music from Mars. Those record evenings resonate down the years so that, even today, to hear the
