Posted on by Stuart Millson · 2 Comments

Overlooked Orpheans

STUART MILLSON enjoys some neglected gems of British music

Why does the spiritual toll of the Great War seem to have been harsher for Britain than for any of the other European combatants, asks organist, scholar, music-writer Robert James Stove, in commentary for a booklet which accompanies a new CD on the Australian Ars Organi label. His answer is clear and convincing: ‘… the innate stability of British political institutions meant a lack of opportunities for citizens to work off their war-neuroses by revolutionary activism, as agitators did on the Continent.’ Only in a marginal way did iconoclasm and an avant-garde spirit affect Britain, post-Passchendaele: for every Vorticist there was a Vaughan Williams offering benediction, although few realised that the composer’s Pastoral Symphony of 1922 was inspired by his own experiences of service on the Western Front. (Listen more closely to the ghostly, wordless voice in the unsettling final movement…)

The new recording, a superb audio curation of British music made in the magnificent acoustic of Our Lady of Victories Basilica, Camberwell, Victoria, Australia, assembles less-well-known names from the canon of Albion’s musical renascence. Alongside John Ireland and Vaughan Williams, for example, are Thomas F. Dunhill (excerpts from his Three Chiddingfold Pieces), Sir Walter Galpin Alcock (Westminster Abbey organist at three coronations during the high-tide of Empire) and Alan Gray (successor to Stanford in the organ loft at Trinity College, Cambridge).

All works and composers chosen by the Ars Organi Recordings for this collection have in common a profound attachment to English tonality (although Norman Fulton, at CD track 11, is a Scot). It is as if the music of our islands is a mirror-image of the (physical and psychological) architecture of the very institutions that have long-governed us. The slow-breathing, hushed voices of churchgoers, a ray of wintry light, piercing through a cathedral window like a gimlet; a sense of eyes being drawn toward the pinnacle of a Norman arch – these are some of the feelings and imaginings inspired by many of the works, some of which are ethereally-enhanced by the participation of singers Elizabeth Barrow (soprano), Brigette De Poi and Emily Tam (mezzo-sopranos), Leighton Triplow (tenor) and bass, James Emerson.

John Ireland’s The Holy Boy and a George Herbert setting (The Call) from Vaughan Williams’s Five Mystical Songs are probably the best-known pieces in the entire collection. Peter Warlock’s old English carol, Adam lay Ybounden, also finds an occasional place in concerts and Radio 3 schedules. But who knows the music of the composer, whose work concludes the CD: Geoffrey Turton Shaw? A near-contemporary of Vaughan Williams, he served as a school inspector and was himself schooled by that master of church music, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. Setting Milton, Ring out, ye crystal spheres/Once bless our human ears… Turton Shaw embodies all the virtues of his genre and world, confirming the past, present and future solidity of English music.

The music of a Welshman, Daniel Jones (1912-1993) makes up another important collection of lesser-known music from our shores, in a well-presented four-disc set from Lyrita Recorded Edition. Many will remember the remarkable ground-breaking Lyrita vinyls of old: symphonies by Bax and Rubbra, John Ireland songs, The Magic Island by William Alwyn, and a record that particularly caught my eye when I first came across it in the record department of Foyles, some 40 years ago – Ireland’s Forgotten Rite, Legend, Mai–Dun and Satyricon – with its strange, haunting cover-artwork; a picture which hinted at the form of a landscape, with dotted colours and distances just out of reach. In fact, if I were to try to find a simple, neat description of Daniel Jones’s music, it would come close to those suggestions inspired by the Ireland graphics – although this enigmatic composer (a code-breaker during World War Two) never really embraced, at least self-consciously, folklore and the symbolism of place. He tended to think of himself as a composer who happened to come from Wales, rather than an artist who had a civic responsibility to proclaim a culture – although he did write a major choral-orchestral piece, The Country Beyond the Stars, which – post-Festival of Britain – seemed to have an ambience of dreamy peninsular coasts, beacons and Black Mountains.

Perhaps the nearest he came to a home-spirit, an imprint of Welshness, was in his Dance Fantasy, performed at the 1982 Proms by the (then) BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra under Bryden Thomson – although the work still seemed somewhat set apart from Welsh dances and Celtic legends by fellow-countrymen Hoddinott, Mathias and Arwel Hughes. And it was at this concert that I briefly met the musician… As I walked around the hall at the end of the evening, making my way back to the tube station and suburbia, I spied the bespectacled composer (this one-time friend of Dylan Thomas) at the Royal Albert Hall Artists’ Entrance. Venturing over, I asked for an autograph, which was cheerfully forthcoming and written in a neat, methodical hand, with a fountain pen. An avuncular, slightly diminutive figure, Daniel Jones seemed very pleased by the performance of his own music at the Proms. (It has to be said, the Proms Planning Department has been less than generous to the composers of Wales.)

Lyrita’s new CD collection puts the music of Jones and Cambria very much on the map. Pianist Martin Jones has spent many hours in the National Library of Wales, painstakingly uncovering an almost Bach-like progression, cycle, abundance of piano works, from a neatly-crafted Capriccio of 1934, to the much more ambitious (“big stride”, was the composer’s own description) Theme, Variations and Fugue in C-sharp minor, dated 1945 – the year of Britten’s Peter Grimes and the advent of the Attlee era. Tonal, but sometimes wandering away from those clear lines; meditative, but never obscurely introverted, Daniel Jones created, it seems, pure music, for its own sake. Rigorous, never arduous, and always making the listener wonder what the next piece will bring.

A great deal of the composer’s character is also suggested by some of the photographic portraits featured in Lyrita’s CD booklet, not least the final black-and-white plate: Dan Jones, with benevolent eyes and a grin, partly concealed by the pint of bitter he is bringing to his lips. A good Welsh brew, no doubt.

CD details

Undertones of War, British Organ and Vocal Music After 1918. Robert James Stove, organ. Ars Organi, AOR004

Daniel Jones, Rediscovered Piano Works, Martin Jones, piano. Lyrita, SRCD.2396

Posted on by Stuart Millson

Sinfonia sparkle for austerity December

An American in Paris
STUART MILLSON is transported to a warmer sound-world

Any sense of malaise, austerity or winter gloom in London was dispelled for two hours (for those fortunate to be in attendance) by the Sinfonia of London’s 2nd December performance of Walton, Ravel, Dutilleux and Gershwin at the Barbican.

Much praised by the critics and always receiving great waves and whoops of adulation even before they have played a note, the Sinfonia’s concerts are an occasion: this mainly young orchestra, handpicked by their enterprising and unpredictable-in-repertoire conductor, John Wilson, playing with much physical joie de vivre and idiomatic interpretation. Confirmation of the latter came in the form of the jazzy trumpet playing – straight from the environs of Tin Pan Alley – in Gershwin’s intoxicating An American in Paris; a score we all know, or thought we knew… True to form, John Wilson, a great fan of the golden age of Hollywood and a musician dedicated to rediscovering lost scores, managed to track down 86 bars of unheard original Gershwin music, reconstituting the piece – turning it from that brilliant, boulevard ballet for Gene Kelly into a symphonic poem of The Great Gatsby era. The cliche, ‘it brought the house down’ certainly applied to this performance, as nuanced as it was bold, as cinematic as a work could ever be.

Yet the Gershwin was not the only work in John Wilson’s line-up that matched the mood of the composer. In Walton’s Scapino overture, the Sinfonia found all the wafting Mediterranean warmth and dry wit for which the English composer (who took himself off, post-war, to the Bay of Naples) is renowned. Similarly in Ravel’s 1903 song-cycle, Sheherazade, whichsets the mysterious oriental poetry of Wagner-attracted ‘Tristan Klingsor’ (otherwise known as Leon Leclere), a heady sense of the exotic and of unattainable sensuous revelation oozed from the Sinfonia strings; complemented by soloist Alice Coote’s equally beguiling articulation and vocal reveries.

Henri Dutilleux, a well-respected French composer who died some ten years ago, was represented by a 1950s’ ballet score, Le Loup, whichsoundedverymuch like a cabaret piece by Milhaud or Satie, turned into a symphonic poem. How authentic the work is as an example of the true musical character of Dutilleux is a matter of debate, but Le Loup – the wolf – had plenty of well-crafted passages for the Sinfonia to enjoy – although the piece, for what it was, did seem rather overblown in length. 

Ravel’s Bolero could be considered as another of those works which, despite being very well known, does not entirely represent the best efforts of its creator. Yet in the hands of John Wilson, the audience had a chance to rediscover and re-hear the piece, entirely. From the first side-drum taps, to the strange, slow, disjointed thrums of the harp, Bolero has a curious mystery to it; an odd sense that you can’t break away or get out of a dream – which, before you know it – has sucked in every instrument of the orchestra and is fast propelling you to the edge of a precipice. John Wilson’s arrival at that moment jolted the Barbican audience into a tidal wave of applause. 

And there was one additional, non-musical touch to the evening: the concert took place in the presence of Hollywood royalty. Enjoying the Gershwin in particular (no doubt), was none other than Gene Kelly’s widow, a lady of immense grace and style – a living reminder of golden ages which now seem out of reach, but which in fact are still just within our grasp.

Posted on by Stuart Millson

“Music for a while, shall all your cares beguile”

STUART MILLSON can hear Restoration London from 21st century Kent

Music@Malling, planned and organised by classical musician and educator, Thomas Kemp, is one of those provincially-based, smaller festivals which succeeds in bringing performers of national and international standing to local and semi-rural settings. So, instead of having to travel to Kings Place, Wigmore Hall, or St. James, Piccadilly for the pleasure of hearing the finest chamber music, discerning audiences in a mid-Kent community need only stroll to their local church, or the modern performance space of the Norman-built Malling Abbey to savour baroque bands such as Fretwork, who gave Music@Malling’s lunchtime concert on Wednesday 28th September.
With thoughts of the succession of the modern monarchy still fresh in our minds, Fretwork transported us to the candlelit rooms of Restoration England – to the great, collective release of breath and creativity that followed the crumbling of Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the return of the ‘Merry Monarch’. It was the great Henry Purcell of William and Mary fame, and the sometimes overlooked Matthew Locke (who possibly taught that renowned composer) who together gave voice to this other, long-before-Elgar English musical renascence. Fretwork’s Malling Abbey tribute to them could not have been more all-encompassing, because although only a group numbering five players and performing just sequences of fantasias, the choice of works somehow captured, perfectly, the authentic soul and sound of the composers and their age. If one representative musical fragment of an epoch could survive, the cadences of those intimate Fantasias would suffice.
Purcell’s immense creativity, packed into his remarkably short life (1659-1695), was legendary; like an English Mozart, a stream of work flowed, with Fretwork giving us an example of this impossible productivity, in the form of Fantasias 8 (in D minor) and No. 9 (in A minor) written on consecutive days. The trait of English melancholia, which would surface again some three centuries later in Vaughan Williams, Britten and Alexander Goehr (the latter earning a place in Fretwork’s programme) is clearly audible in Purcell’s music, but perhaps less so in Matthew Locke’s Consort of Four Parts No. 3, who allowed more of the spirit of the boisterous bourrée into his music, but still tempering his lighter touch, with the reflection of the sentimental saraband.

Alexander Goehr. Photo: Etan Tal. Wikimedia Commons

In his introduction to the concert, Festival organiser, Thomas Kemp, spoke of Purcell’s music as “harmonically complex for the period in which it was written”. Yet contemporary composer, Alexander Goehr, writing in an age of deliberately difficult atonality, decided to reach back to the general harmonies of Purcell’s time in his own Fantasias, written for Fretwork in 2000. Goehr’s music may be seen as Purcell through a modern prism (like Britten’s absorption of Dowland) and yet the Fantasia No. 2 for Five Viols begins with an abrupt phrase – a jolt, or disturbance in the autumnal English landscape, confirming Goehr as no purveyor of pastiche, but a composer in the continuum stretching back to Purcell and Locke’s time.
Ancient and modern were reconciled not just in the music. Fretwork’s music-stands held, not paper scores, but digital devices on whose screens were displayed the staves and notes of the 17th century. It was a fitting touch at this most memorable recital.

Posted on by Stuart Millson · 1 Comment

Summer with the Sinfonia

Tintagel. Photo: Chris Gunn. Wikimedia Commons
STUART MILLSON enjoys a super-orchestra’s seasonal offerings

The re-formed Sinfonia of London (a recording and film-score orchestra of the 1960s) appeared at the Proms on Saturday 16th July under the baton of the ever-popular John Wilson, for a concert of music by British composers. The programme was made up of Vaughan Williams’ 1910 Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, Welsh composer, Huw Watkins’s new Flute Concerto, the Partita by Walton, Bax’s 1917 Arthurian tone-poem, Tintagel, and Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’ of 1899.

The Sinfonia is a handpicked, super-orchestra – a superior “scratch-band” of top freelancers, players drawn from existing orchestras and even members of string quartets and chamber groups, dedicated to reviving the idea of “demonstration sound quality”, i.e. dazzling, virtuoso performance, chiefly in a studio setting. A previous example of this type of ensemble was the old National Philharmonic Orchestra, which appeared on the RCA label and notched up some notable recordings, often under conductors such as the suave American, Charles Gerhardt. But to have real life and vigour, an orchestra must play in public, so what better arena for publicising the dynamic stage presence of your orchestra than at the Proms on a Saturday evening, right at the beginning of the season?

Thomas Tallis

And what finer non-ecclesiastical setting for a cathedral-inspired piece, such as the Tallis Fantasia, than the Royal Albert Hall, in which John Wilson cleverly created antiphonal special effects by placing part of his string band in a line, high on the right at the rear of the platform? The two bodies of strings answered each other: the music moving across the centuries, from Tallis’s Elizabethan sound-world of church voices, to the well-upholstered, romantic early 20th-century string writing of Vaughan Williams. 

Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1898. British Library. Wikimedia Commons

The one new work in the programme, the Huw Watkins Flute Concerto also suited the hall’s great acoustic – a beautifully air-borne thing and (for this reviewer) strangely reminiscent of a scene from the Ken Loach film, Kes, about a boy from a deprived background, spiritually rescued by a chance ownership of a hawk. In the film, there is a moving scene where the boy takes his kestrel to a field at the edge of the northern town in which he little more than exists, and flies him with all the skill of a mediaeval falconer. The bird takes to the wing, accompanied by flute music, neither tuneful nor atonal, which seems to represent freedom, air, longing, space. All of those qualities were to be found in the Huw Watkins piece, played by distinguished soloist, Adam Walker.

The great (literally) landmark work of the evening was the 1917 tone-poem by Englishman and also Celtic enthusiast, Arnold Bax, Tintagel. The composer visited the dreamy north Cornwall coast with his mistress, fellow musician Harriet Cohen, and found deep escapism and solace in the ancient surroundings of rocky coast and the ever-present gentle, heaving breast of the sleepy Atlantic. The work begins in pure, clear-blue summertime, but as Bax pointed out in an explanation of the piece, not a windless day.

John Wilson’s orchestra began their evocation with gentle, dreamy woodwind conjuring a feeling of sea-birds and distances. The growing swell of the sea against the rocky sentinels of Cornwall’s headlands was beautifully executed in the surging, strong, cohesive orchestral tide of sound created by the Sinfonia. But just as quickly as the physical setting of Cornwall has been established, Bax then begins to dissolve it all, with the supernatural drama of the ancient kings, Arthur and Mark, and the destructive, legendary love of Tristan and Isolde – the latter, a symbol of Bax’s own romantic entanglement. The composer wrote several Celtic-folklore-inspired pieces and seven impressive, well-orchestrated symphonies (the Fourth being the most radiant and most-often played, although an outing for a Bax symphony is still a rare occasion). 

What Tintagel represents is a (nearly) fifteen minutes-long condensed symphony – a clear, concise distillation of some of the more long-winded ideas which all long symphonic structures have, but which in the case of this piece are assembled with utterly persuasive and spellbinding cohesion and power. Not a note is wasted in Tintagel: there is a beginning, middle and an end, and like Sibelius’s The Oceanides (a tone-poem of some ten minutes), a listener or concertgoer can instantly know the composer just from this one calling-card piece.

With instantly recognisable pieces in mind, the concert concluded with Walton’s shimmering, Italianate Partita, written in the Mediterranean sun and siesta of the late 1950s – and Elgar’s Variations on an Original Theme, (‘Enigma’), penned at the end of the 19th century, but looking forward with masterful confidence to a new century and (for Elgar) new successes and untold honours. Again, the Sinfonia of London matched the mood, its players responding with great physical commitment to the scores of these British giants; men whose music, in different ways, captured the spirit of our native music.

Skara Brae on the Orkneys. Photo: Daniel Bordeleau. Wikimedia Commons

Yet what really is our native music? – as BBC Radio 3’s Tom Service (a Scot) asked in the evening’s programme notes. Slightly dismissive of the insularity of the land “sandwiched between Hadrian’s Wall and the South Coast” (his words), the writer nevertheless correctly noted the way in which our music has transcended the country’s physical boundaries. However, metropolitan observers should not be so quick to dismiss country cottages and “folky-wolky melodies”. As Vaughan Williams pointed out, all great universal art is rooted in a place, whether Bach’s Lutheran northern Germany, or the Spain of Velazquez. And as Tom Service should know, modern composer Peter Maxwell Davies, who settled in the Orkney Islands, immersed himself in a Scottish island identity, garnering, like a beachcomber, every conceivable Orcadian cadence, myth into his music, showing just how powerful “insularity” can be as a creative inspiration.

The capacity audience at the Royal Albert Hall, not a bit dissuaded by the Met. Office’s red-alert, heat-wave weather warnings, gave the performers a typical Proms ovation. And John Wilson gave them in return, one more piece – an encore from Eric Coates’s Summer Days suite, a nostalgic, innocent waltz. Judging by the overflowing applause, it is a world that still means something to so many.

Posted on by Jacob Riyeff

On First Concert at the Bradley Symphony Center, Milwaukee

JACOB RIYEFF (@riyeff) is a translator, teacher, and poet. His work focuses on the Western contemplative tradition and the natural world. Jacob lives in the Upper Midwestern U.S. with his wife and three growing children.

”A man’s attitude to life.” (Feb 20, 2022)

O Edward Elgar, did you see our faces
rapt in darkness, hearts attuned to your cello
As you lay upon your deathbed, traces
Of joy accompanying the low and mellow
Tones the strings invite our ears to hear
Amid glissando runs to keep the mind
And body clear? You cursed its weak premiere
But here a hundred years past you find
A willing crowd to celebrate your movements
As you lay in Worcester gasping for air‚
From lyric to rondo, fulfillment
In sonic pattern, virtuosic fare.
Could you see, in your final agony,
Our festival of superfluity?

Posted on by R J Stove

Diary of an organ-playing nobody

Credit: Shutterstock
R. J. STOVE reflects on life as an antipodean performer on the King of Instruments

‘“What?”, said [piano manufacturer] Herr Stein. “A man like you …  wants to play on an instrument which has no sweetness, no expression, no piano, no forte, but is always the same?” “That does not matter,” I replied. “In my eyes and ears, the organ is the King of Instruments”.’ (Mozart)

Disheartening to report, Bismarck never uttered the epigram so often attributed to him: ‘Laws are like sausages: it is better not to see them being made.’ But each time I undertake a commercial recording – and I have undertaken three such now, all devoted to organ music – I am painfully reminded of this misattributed quotation.

Because if you contemplate classical music in recorded form (as the vast majority of journalists discussing it do contemplate it) through a haze of aestheticism, assuming that nothing ever happens in front of the microphone without the loftiest and most disinterested of motives, then the best cure for such kumbaya soft-headedness is actually to make recordings yourself. The procedure is death to entitlement culture, death to the near-enough-is-good-enough mindset, and death to all romanticist whimsies about artistic ‘inspiration.’

Among didactic processes, only an obligatory course in obstetrics would strip away more illusions from the novice, and strip them away faster, than recording production does. I cannot help musing over how much polysyllabic Marxist verbiage Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno would have spared us – how much Teutonic vamping about ‘the aura of mechanical reproduction’ and ‘bourgeois commodification of ritual’ they would have eschewed – if they had experienced for themselves, which they did not, the perils of needing to perform as flawlessly as possible within seconds of a producer turning a red light on. Not to mention the still greater perils of needing to keep one’s temper each time a producer is obliged to halt a take because of extraneous noise issuing from (i) seagulls overhead, (ii) a helicopter overhead, (iii) a passing ambulance siren, (iv) revving-up from a motorcyclist, or most frequently (v) all of the above.

A producer of classical recordings, if he (and, whether we like it or not, it remains a male-dominated profession) wishes to survive, has to be part surgeon, part electronic engineer, part Cecil B. De Mille, part Grand Inquisitor, part concierge, part therapist, and all musician. His role entails some of the attributes perceptible in the great symphonic conductors: notably an X-ray ear which can descry faults in even the most imposing wash of sound. When an orchestra gives its all in the mightiest of Respighian climaxes, the producer must be able to detect the third oboist who, amid the hubbub, mistakenly played an F sharp instead of the score’s indicated F natural: and to call out that oboist – politely, one trusts; rudely, if trust be impossible – over the error.

Yet that is almost the least of what the producer needs to do. He requires a retentive memory not for various takes’ musical contents alone, but for various takes’ volume levels. Should consecutive takes differ from each other in this regard, or in regard to the venue’s atmosphere (known among the cognoscenti as ‘atmos’ for short), he has to minimise those differences. No surprise that, even before the compulsory post-production chores, his copies of the sheet-music will have become so scribbled-over in red Texta as to resemble Jackson Pollock’s action-paintings. 

Physical strength is a prerequisite as well. Especially if confronted with an unfamiliar site, he will be expected to lug prodigious quantities of cords, plugs, microphones, power sockets, monitor speakers, and computer hardware from his vehicle, before he assembles them: only to carry out the whole boring process in reverse when the session concludes. In this assembling and disassembling, he cannot and must not be rushed. It is hard for even the most arrogant performer to demand, with a clear conscience, additional haste from someone who can accidentally electrocute the entire dramatis personae if an exposed cable proves insufficiently earthed or a wire has worn through its sheath.

Therefore it is understandable that for every thousand good classical musicians out there, scarcely a single good classical recording producer can be traced. The best ones – they have included Walter Legge, Brian Culverhouse, and John Culshaw among the dead, and my own brilliant producer Thomas Grubb among the living – can charge whatever fees they like. Although COVID might have decluttered their timetables, it has not reduced (nor should it reduce) their invoices. Sir George Martin, at a period when the Beatles’ fame had yet to transcend Liverpudlian city limits, produced many a classical recording for EMI. He entertainingly recounted this function’s more bizarre aspects in his 1977 memoir All You Need Is Ears.           

Nevertheless, whilst the good classical recording producer is as rare a bird as a left-handed red-headed Christadelphian, the good classical recording producer who can skilfully capture organ music is analogous to a left-handed red-headed Christadelphian who can do five hundred consecutive push-ups. With an orchestra or a chamber ensemble, after all, a producer has the luxury of operating in a more or less conventional studio. The designers of that studio will have taken some pains to soundproof it. In that studio he will be visible, albeit behind his desk, for at least some of the time to at least some of the musicians involved. He can rely on none of these advantages when recording organ music.

For as all organists – but all too few non-organists – know, pipe organs are not just musical instruments. They are, by definition, musical instruments ensconced in particular buildings, and habitually irremovable therefrom through any methods less radical than Semtex.

Many church instruments are installed in such a way as to force the organist to play with his back turned not only to the altar, but to the producer. Rear-view mirrors at the organ console possess limited efficacy. (During my own most recent sessions – cooped up as I unavoidably was in the loft – the worst thing which I could have done was the thing which all halfway decent musicians, by default, do: constantly listening to fellow performers. Instead, I needed as a deliberate procedure to play well ahead of the beat, purely so the final product’s hearers would have the aural impression of my keeping time with the five singers. All five, for balance-mandated rather than COVID-mandated reasons, remained invisible to me in the nave below. It took a crucial half-second for the organ sound to reach them from the loft’s phalanx of pipes.)

Whether a pipe organ be sacred or secular, its tuning will be always expensive. Rapid tuning is downright impossible. In a climate as manic as Melbourne’s, where two consecutive days will often enough be respectively 32 degrees or 14 degrees (not to mention vice versa), even the best-built instrument can unexpectedly acquire several out-of-tune pipes: without fail, the pipes most suitable to the music’s content. Ten times more worrying is the organist’s greatest dread: a cipher, whereby a particular keyboard note or pedal-board note sounds and cannot be switched off. Imagine the most persistent ambulance or police-car ululation which you have ever heard; then imagine such an ululation in an ecclesiastical context, when the nearest organ-tuner is unavailable through being hospitalized, or on holidays, or repairing an instrument in a different church, or simply drunk.

But you have not yet supped full on organ-related horrors. The 1970s Anglo-Saxon mania for carpeting what had been perfectly acceptable wooden or stone floors ruins many a church’s acoustics. Beautifully manufactured though a pipe organ might be, ubiquitous carpet will frequently make it sound like a Casio burp-box vended below cost price on eBay. Even churches free from carpets are apt to be located on main roads, their architecture dating from an epoch where internal combustion engines were largely unimaginable. However impressive their stonework, they offer almost no insulation from modern traffic noise. Factor in the tendency of churches to support church schools, and the aural complications are aggravated threefold. If you have never attempted to record a beautifully soft, French impressionist organ prelude while shrieking infants gallivant in the playground during their lunch break, your personal acquaintance with existential anguish is automatically limited.

Given these and other nuisances, you could be pardoned for asking why anyone would wish to record organ music in the first place: let alone to record three CDs’ worth of it, as I have done, with a fourth CD currently awaiting issue. Speaking as a middle-rank Melbourne organist with twenty-one years of remunerated public playing behind me – neither enjoying the rarely-conferred benefits of sustained cathedral employment, nor suffering the griefs of the overworked tyro frantically having to pad out an exiguous résumé – I find myself caught in not one but three perfect storms.

First of these storms is, naturally, COVID. Useless, and redundant, for me to expatiate here upon the damage which Wuhan’s most renowned export has done to live classical music performance in general; live classical music performance in Australia especially; and live classical music performance in Melbourne above all. 

The second among these storms is one which foreigners will be able to predict with a little thought: Australian churches’ continuing sex abuse crisis, primarily (though not exclusively) afflicting Catholicism. Every dollar which dioceses are ordered to spend upon paying off an abuse victim’s lawyer, is a dollar which dioceses cannot spend upon professional musicians. Australia’s Catholic parishes were in demographic free-fall long before front-page headlines screamed about the pandemic.

As far back as 2011 – in other words, not solely pre-COVID but pre-abuse scandals too – 87% of Australia’s Catholics could not bestir themselves to attend Sunday Mass. We all know the only branches of Australian Christianity where the churches are full: the Pentecostal brigades, of which Hillsong is the most celebrated. Anyone gullible enough to believe that Pentecostal jamborees are likely to include organ-playing, or any musical contributions whatever except those supplied by sub-Hendrix guitarists and gyrating Taylor Swift wannabes needs (to borrow a felicitous, long-ago phrase from Esquire) not merely his head but his entire anatomy examined. 

One much-loved hymn tells us: ‘There is a happy land, far, far away.’ There are in fact several such happy lands where university posts can, and do, recompense organists for the uncertainties of ecclesiastical occupations. Unfortunately, these happy lands do not include my own. In any analysis of today’s antipodean academe, the third perfect storm afflicting organists can be at once recognised. Australia’s ever more shambolic federal government has added, to its widely-shared record of COVID-related ineptitude, a malice all its own when it comes to higher education.

The most vituperative surviving Khmer Rouge commissar, and the most frenziedly anti-intellectual Mississippi Klansman, might well blanch at the overt hatred towards humanities departments that routinely emanates from Scott Morrison and his Canberra colleagues. These legislators expend their hatred not specifically on left-wing and/or spendthrift humanities departments, but on humanities departments per se. For all their mismanagement when it comes to public health, they have demonstrated impressive populist cynicism on pedagogical issues. They discern the absolute monetary dependence upon the welfare state which has characterised Australian academe from its beginning; which is certain to characterise it until Judgement Day; and which has resisted four decades’ worth of libertarian think-tanks’ harangues about the private sector’s alleged enthusiasm for acting as Maecenas. More and more, the very concept of private universities for Australia is proving as mythical (indeed, in its bogus promises, almost as pernicious) as those other nostrums propounded by fantasising savants: The Classless Society; Sex With No Strings Attached; Exporting Democracy To The Third World; No-Fault Divorce; and – who can doubt the essential illegitimacy of this doctrine likewise? – COVID Zero.

Last year I had the privilege of an academic post, necessarily casual in nature, under Sydney University’s auspices. Having written earlier about the pleasure which I took in this post (and about how gratified I would be if the post continued into 2022, which perhaps it will), I obviously must not repeat myself here. But I would be crazy to nourish sanguine hopes that Australia will permit for me an academic – dare I even employ so ‘elitist’ a noun as the following? – ‘career.’ My sixtieth birthday fell shortly before last Christmas; and quite apart from my innate lack of youthful cred, it is hard to envisage any status less welcome to modish Human Resources departments than my own Google-aided identifiability as a white straight male Catholic.

No individual, therefore, will be more delighted than I to gain further academic emolument. Equally, no individual is less prone than I to take any such emolument for granted. My research background has been the opposite of fashionable: last year I completed my doctoral thesis on Sir Charles Villiers Stanford’s organ output. In any contest between a candidate who has specialised in Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, versus a candidate who has specialised in transgendered rappers from Bali, no prizes are offered for guessing the probable victor.

This all explains, ultimately, why I find myself investing greater and greater sunk costs in the project – which is, I concede, a First World problem – of capturing my organ-playing on record. By so doing, I might (I repeat: might) convince university employment’s arbiters to overlook my chronological, ethnic, and religious disadvantages.

Going to the effort and expense of issuing no fewer than four CDs indicates, at least, exceptional dedication and single-mindedness. So, of course, does becoming a kamikaze pilot. Time will pronounce whether the former occupational choice supplies any better long-term prospects than did the latter.

Meanwhile, in defending my own gramophonic incontinence, I am tempted to quote Maurice Chevalier’s brusque retort to a question about how much happiness he experienced in old age. What (the straw-hatted Gallic divo inquired) is the alternative?

Posted on by Stuart Millson

John Pritchard – master of sonorities

STUART MILLSON recalls an unjustly overlooked conductor

The early 1980s was a vintage time for British orchestral music. Gennady Rozhdestvensky was halfway into his term (1978-1982) as Chief Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, a position which brought great kudos to the ensemble – Rozhdestvensky recording and performing Tchaikovsky ballet music, and venturing into the pastoral realm of Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony. Other home-grown artists, such as Sir Charles Groves, James Loughran and Norman Del Mar also exerted a great influence, especially at the annual Henry Wood Proms season – Groves being one of the first post-war conductors to record a large amount of recondite British music, from Delius to Grace Williams. But if a seasoned concertgoer of a certain age were to wander along the Arena or Gallery queue at a Promenade concert of the last few years, and ask any of the younger Prommers: ‘Does the name, John Pritchard, mean anything to you?’ – it is likely that your question would be met by a blank expression. Switch on your radio, turn the dial to Radio 3 (if it is not already permanently in that position!) and listen to the current complement of thirty-something presenters. Again, the name of Pritchard is absent from the CD choices and schedules.

Sir John Pritchard, who died in 1989 at the age of 68, was an orchestral and operatic conductor who secured some of the most prestigious positions available in his profession: opera houses in Brussels and Cologne, not to mention a golden age at Glyndebourne, and senior roles with the Royal Liverpool, London Philharmonic and BBC Symphony orchestras. Indeed, Sir John was, at different times, Chief Conductor of all three ensembles. He was also one of the most regular guest conductors at the Proms, appearing throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and then as the BBC’s principal maestro during the early and mid-1980s. His last concert in this country was the Last Night of the 1989 season – a triumphant farewell, made even more emotional by his serious illness, and the fact that he defied medical advice to appear at all.

Although much associated with the operas of Mozart and Strauss, and the broad classical repertoire (he often mentioned his ‘own interests in the great classics’), Pritchard conducted a vast number of concerts of British and English music – the well-known, the rare, and the contemporary. Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast was a speciality, the work – with its dazzling choral writing and antiphonal brass bands – concluding his First Night of the 1984 season. And just for good measure, the evening began with A London Symphony by Vaughan Williams, and a somewhat becalmed Elgar Sea Pictures (Dame Janet Baker, soloist) in the centre. The previous year, a magnificent tribute was paid to Elgar and Walton, with the conductor and BBC Symphony Orchestra striding out in Walton’s Crown Imperial and Violin Concerto, and an epic Elgar Symphony No. 1 that greatly divided critics. For Meirion Bowen in The Guardian, it was the ‘best performance of a standard repertoire work I have heard from this conductor and orchestra.’ For Nicholas Kenyon in The Times, the evening was more hit-and-miss, the reading marred by ‘blaring, unrestrained brass’ – even though the end of the slow movement ‘worked its potent magic.’ And the 1983 season was opened by Pritchard in auspicious circumstances with a remarkable performance of the Grande Symphonie Funèbre et Triomphale by Berlioz, a piece requiring a multiplication of the usual sections of the orchestra – a panoply of brass, wind and percussion, the latter seeing the inclusion of the curious, whirling Pavillon Chinoise (or ‘jingling Johnny’). Pritchard’s operatic training enabled him to see the importance of spectacle, and honouring a score to the full.

Belshazzar’s Feast, by Rembrandt. Walton’s setting of the story was one of Pritchard’s specialities

Pritchard was often known as a master of sonorities, a reputation which can be understood by listening to an account of Elgar’s In The South, again with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, recorded on the BBC Radio Classics label, and given at the 1974 Proms. And it has to be said that the analogue sound of the period seems to capture the resonance and reverberation of the Royal Albert Hall much more than today’s supposedly superior digital relays – a surprisingly dry and boxy effect (at least, to my ears) from a place known for its grandeur and echo. The BBC S.O. of the 1970s also sounds somewhat different – a more striking, sharper brass sound than today, a weightier impact (dare I say!) from all departments of the orchestra.

The 1981 Proms saw Pritchard on the rostrum, not with an orchestral warhorse or piece of brash modernism, but with an overlooked romantic masterpiece – the 1907 Piano Concerto by Frederick Delius, with the soloist Sir Clifford Curzon. I was present at the concert, standing in about the third or fourth row of the Arena, overwhelmed by the directness of the work – for we tend to see Delius not as the writer of strong movements, but as an altogether more fluid, perhaps even meandering impressionist. How refreshing to enjoy a change from Grieg and Schumann (wonderful though they are) and to find, what Sir Henry Wood might have termed, a true novelty.

Yet atonal and contemporary music was given its place by Pritchard. During his tenure in Liverpool during the 1950s and 1960s, he launched a Musica Viva series, dedicated to the sort of experiments we have now come to expect from the Proms new-music commissioners. Some twenty years later, he continued to take up the baton for composers such as Birtwistle. I recall being much absorbed by the strangeness of The Triumph of Time given in a Radio 3 broadcast in about 1982. Although not a follower of the aforementioned composer, one must – surely – praise a conductor who (like Pritchard) is prepared to play any genre of music for a multitude of listeners and tastes, whether of the mainstream or the minority.

‘New music’ need not necessarily scare us: Britten’s Gloriana and Walton’s Second Symphony were both given their premieres by Sir John (or Mr. Pritchard as he was in those years). Reports, though, of Britten’s frustration with his conductor did not make for an easy first night or general working relationship. ‘JP’ was known as something of a bon viveur, and it was said that he became bored easily. He arrived late at Covent Garden for rehearsals, something alien to Britten – a stickler for single-minded artistic discipline. There is even a report of a Glyndebourne official being despatched to the Eastbourne seafront, with a loudhailer… ‘Is there a John Pritchard on the beach?’ Work beckoned!

Trips to the beach and restaurants aside, the conductor covered an astonishing range of native music: Holst’s The Hymn of Jesus, The Planets, Elgar’s Violin Concerto (an admirable recording exists of a 1986 rendition with Ida Haendel), a symphony by Ruth Gipps, Music for Strings by Bliss, and Parry’s Blest Pair of Sirens (programmed alongside the Enigma Variations and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde). He also recorded works by Alan Rawsthorne with the London Philharmonic, available on the Lyrita label, and – like Sir Adrian Boult – had no difficulties with enjoying the sheer pleasures of an Eric Coates march.

Much loved by Proms audiences who admired his Bruckner and Berlioz, and his sensitive reading of Vaughan Williams’s Job, and by radio listeners who would hear Bliss’s A Colour Symphony, or Janacek’s Sinfonietta, followed by Elgar’s Second Symphony, Pritchard gave remarkable and long service to the cause of artistic variety, and to that of English music. His last major recording (a commercial disc on the BBC Artium label) was of Scriabin’s Third Symphony, a voluptuous score from the very end of late-romanticism – shimmering, over-ripe orchestration and colour from a Russian master obsessed by mysticism and themes of ecstasy. Pritchard also conducted Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony (a work thickly layered with history and revolutionary meaning) at a Royal Festival Hall concert in 1985 – raising eyebrows, because he was hitherto unconnected to this most political of twentieth-century composers. The audience and critics alike were surprised and overwhelmed by the performance.

Pritchard’s biographer, Helen Conway, hinted at a restlessness, an unhappiness in the conductor’s life – although the book shows many pictures of the man at social gatherings, parties, exhibiting a love of (perhaps, excessive) good living. Like Benjamin Britten, Pritchard was outwardly socially conservative, always immaculately attired, elegant and formal, and although not a flamboyant maestro, nevertheless an authoritative figure on the concert podium. We must hope that the BBC still has the many tapes of his concerts and studio performances. Their loss would mean a significant gap in our appreciation of post-war British music.

Posted on by Alexander Adams

Dreaming of utopias past

Henry Wrong, first administrator of the Barbican Centre, overlooking the build. Credit: Barbican Archive

Building Utopia: The Barbican Centre

Nicholas Kenyon et al, Batsford, 2022, 288pp, fully illus., £40

ALEXANDER ADAMS acknowledges a modernist monument’s coming of age

My first exposure to the Barbican Centre came obliquely. In the children’s science-fiction drama The Tripods, when the producers for the (somewhat cash-strapped) BBC programme had to come up with a futuristic city-cum-biosphere in 1985, they selected the Barbican as one filming location. The palm-filled Barbican conservatory was suitably modern and exotic – at least for a child in the provinces. Years later, I worked in an office adjacent to the Barbican and walked its disorientating aerial walkways daily by rote, knowing that any clever shortcut would lead me inevitably and inconveniently astray. Barbican library became my local library.

Isometric drawing of the Barbican Arts Centre as built, by John Ronayne, August 1982. Credit: Barbican Archive

When it was built, between 1972 and 1982, the Barbican Centre was the UK’s most ambitious urban-planning project to reach construction stage. It houses cinemas, concert halls, exhibition galleries, conference rooms, a theatre, restaurants, shops, cafés, a library and car park in an estate that consists of 2,000 residences, mostly in high-rise towers, all built in a Brutalist style. The new hardback Building Utopia: The Barbican Centre marks the 40th anniversary of the Barbican Centre’s completion, the 50th anniversary of its commencement and (approximately) the 65th anniversary of its conception. Multiple specialist writers cover the origins of the project, the politics and development of the building process and outline the highlights and remit of the cultural activities of the centre. A plethora of photographs capture the centre throughout its operation, from construction up to today, with some shots of classic performances and memorable events. 

The site of the Barbican Centre is Aldersgate, next to Silk Street, Beech Street and Whitecross Street, close to St Paul’s Cathedral in the City of London. The site had been bombed almost completely flat during the Blitz and thus the location presented itself for wholesale redevelopment – on a grand scale, integrating accommodation and facilities. It was already served by Moorgate Station (Northern line underground and mainline) and was within walking distance of the offices and banks of the City. There was little residential consultation – following wartime devastation, Cripplegate district had a residential population of 58. The photographs of the flattened district, with St Paul’s in the background, is a stark reminder of the state of British cities in the post-war aftermath. 

It seems the impetus behind having so many residences was partly political. Sir Nicholas Kenyon, former Managing Director of the Barbican Centre, writes:

The vanishing residential population of the Square Mile posed an existential threat to the survival of the Corporation [of the City of London], with its independent governance and long traditions, for there was a serious possibility in the post-war years that, without residents and voters, there might be a move to incorporate the City into London County Council.

Hostility from LCC and the Arts Council caused friction with the Barbican Centre and led to tussles over funding and control. LCC wanted greater commercial development; the Corporation wanted residences and arts. The Corporation won out and architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon were appointed to design the centre and estate buildings. An initial costing of £10m was eventually to balloon to £150m by the time of completion.  

The Lakeside Terrace of the newly completed Barbican building in 1982, with Frobisher Crescent behind. Credit: Peter Bloomfield

The scale of the project is still – in our age of mega-structures – impressive (‘the largest single building for the arts in the Western world.’) The over thirty lifts include one that can transport a twenty-tonne lorry. The distinctive unpainted pitted concrete surfaces of walls were originally smooth before they were pick-hammered by men with pneumatic drills. This was time-consuming and thus expensive. Some aspects were flawed in design. The sculpture courtyard was rarely used because the weight of pieces was considered a potential structural danger to the building below. The gallery space has always been disappointing – a reflection of its late inclusion in the design – and has never lived up to the other facilities of the venue.   


The opening of the Barbican Centre on 3 March 1982: the Queen unveiling the plaque in the foyer, accompanied by The Rt Hon the Lord Mayor Sir Christopher Leaver. Credit: Barbican Archive

When the centre was opened by the Queen on 3 March 1982, the building seemed anachronistic – both behind the times and ahead of them. The building seemed ponderous and unsympathetic, alien in its stylistic unity; cultural tourism was not as developed and streamlined as it would become so there were many doubts about the viability of a costly arts hub. The architecture seemed heavy and uncompromising in a time when Post-Modernism was jettisoning concepts of “truth to materials”, Brutalism and stylistic conformity. Its broad walkways and windswept courtyards seemed too ambitious and forbidding; its thick brass railings seemed passé. More than anything, Brutalism’s intimidating size and lack decorative concession seemed anti-human and indicative of failed visions of Communistic Eastern Europe and corner-cutting city councils. Today, attitudes to Brutalism are changing. Brutalism is an Instagram favourite topic and subject of photo essays and coffee-table books. The high aspirations and unapologetic futurity of Brutalist concrete structures exhilarates the young urban crowd.

The London Symphony Orchestra has been resident at the Barbican since it opened.  The Royal Shakespeare Company acted as consultants as the theatre was designed. However, organisational politics and wrangles over income and subsidies caused Barbican to lose the RSC in an acrimonious parting in 2002 (‘The RSC were reluctant tenants. We were grumpy landlords.’) A transcription of a discussion between senior insiders notes that ‘the Corporation saw the conferences as money generators, and orchestras as money spenders.’ Balancing artistic considerations against commercial one is a constant negotiation, as is that of high culture versus experimental programming. (Although apparently the BBC-funded 1985 Stockhausen festival turned into a sell-out success.) Views on the acoustics of the concert hall were mixed; the acoustics noticeably improved once the Perspex hemispheres were removed from the ceiling. The opinions of performers, conductors and critics are summarised.   

Barbican Cinema brochures from the early 1980s. Credit: Barbican Archive

Most of the fittings are bespoke, which added to the cost but were congruent and effective within the overall design. (There is a great shot of Robin Day’s strongly coloured concert-hall seats.) The signage was considered inadequate from the beginning, leading to notorious navigation difficulties. A Barbican poster announced, ‘If Helen Mirren can find the new Barbican Centre before it opens in March, she will be appearing in Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ The book has many photographs of these details, as well as plans, maps, images of construction, aerial views and vintage shots. A selection of posters shows the breadth of programming over the last 40 years, reminding readers of memorable experiences. The authors are either specialists in their fields or they are individuals who have worked at a high level in Barbican Centre management. Short testimonies by knowledgeable figures (including performers, managers and users) intersperse longer narratives, which show palpable affection but address faults. Subjects include the Barbican’s architecture, theatre, music, art, cinema, typefaces and branding and plentiful insights into the management.

Building Utopia: The Barbican Centre presents a comprehensive and sympathetic presentation of one of modern Britain’s most iconic buildings. Not universally loved as a building – indeed, still disliked by many – the Barbican Centre continues to act as an important centre for high culture. Most importantly, the Barbican is largely an independent enterprise, with relatively low and indirect tax-payer subsidies. Today, the Barbican’s distance from the interfering hand of government is more vital than ever.

Posted on by Richard Dove

‘Satyagraha’ – joy and rapture at the ENO

RICHARD DOVE reflects on Philip Glass’s timeless opera

In 1960s Lower Manhattan there was a very definite merging of culture and logistics.  If you had ordered a new wardrobe or dining table it was distinctly possible that the delivery men could be the two masters of emerging minimalism, Philip Glass and Steve Reich.  They both freelanced for a company called Low Rate Movers.  The art critic Robert Hughes needed a plumber to fix his dishwasher and was more than surprised when a smock-clad man with a shock of black hair and a bag of plumber’s tools showed up.  ‘But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here? You’re an artist.’  Glass explained that whilst he was an artist, he was also a plumber.

The music of Philip Glass now graces concert halls and opera houses around the world.  He is a prolific composer having forged a style of layered repetition and exquisite harmonies that beguiles many and upsets not a few.  As I walked to the Coliseum in central London, I passed a few plumbers’ vans.  I hoped that, in a wonderful act of circularity, at least one or two were heading to the latest production of Glass’s totemic opera, Satyagraha.  This was the last night, so it would be their last London opportunity for some time.

‘This is just wonderful.’  For my audience neighbour, it was her first Philip Glass experience.  ‘Well, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do’, I replied.  Glass’s astonishing avalanche of creativity has seen the creation of over thirty operas, thirteen symphonies, small ensemble pieces, concertos and countless film scores. 

Satyagraha was the return to business of the English National Opera after what it described as ‘an extended interval.’ The opera is, to use the ENO’s highly appropriate description, a ‘meditation’ on Gandhi’s early years in South Africa, a co-production with New York’s Metropolitan Opera with conductor Carolyn Kuan and director Phelim McDermott. It is sung in Sanskrit with words from the Bhagavad Gita and some of the headline translations were mostly obscured for us on the balcony and above. It did not matter.  It was an immersing mediation, and the plot was insignificant.  It is an emotional journey through Gandhi’s embrace of non-violent protest to change minds and politics.  The looping harmonies and spectacular staging created an embracing ambiance where you can pick and choose what you look at and how you interpret the narrative.  The result is, to use another ENO programme description, ‘mesmeric’.

Satyagraha is Sanskit for ‘truth force’ and the opera takes you and back and forth in Gandhi’s life as his philosophy of protest takes shape and consequence.   Sean Panikkar brought nuance and quiet strength to the role of Gandhi as he slowly walked the stage, his voice both tender and firm.  The huge, imposing corrugated iron wall set resonated a South Africa shantytown.  Meditation became a dream populated by Phelim McDermott’s vast puppets, the wicker emu being a particular highlight, and Julian Crouch’s soaring adaptable sets. The immense power of the voices of Verity Wingate and Felicity Buckland cut through the coughing and rustling (in my vicinity) and commanded attention. 

Satyagraha is the third of Glass’s so-called Portrait trilogy – Einstein on the Beach (which he staged largely with his own savings and had to drive a New York cab and deliver furniture to recover financially) and Akhnaten, the Egyptian Sun God which was also staged by Phelim McDermott in 2016.  None of the three operas have a lateral narrative, but wander through their subjects’ lives and experiences. The music is described as minimalist, but it is nothing of the sort. The motif of repetition masks constant change and highs and lows of emotion. It requires from the players and the conductor both technical and emotional engagement. As Glass himself says:

What you hear depends on how you focus your ear. We’re not talking about inventing a new language, but rather inventing new perceptions of existing languages. I don’t like using language to convey meaning. I’d rather use images and music.

For my neighbour, new to all this, it was a state of rapture despite often not knowing what was going on. She told me she worked at St Thomas’ Hospital and it was just joyful to be part of an audience again after an horrific eighteen months. Joy and rapture, not a bad way to spend a Thursday evening.

As I left the Opera House, I noticed the plumbers’ vans had disappeared.  Some domestic emergency interrupting Act 3?  The composer is close on 85 years old and yet his creativity is undiminished.  His Symphonies No 14 and 15 receive their world premieres next year as does a new ballet called ‘Alice’.   Clearly, the days of furniture moving and dishwasher repair are long gone.

Posted on by R J Stove · 1 Comment

Unfinished symphony in Oz

R. J. STOVE says reports of the death of Australian classical music education have been greatly exaggerated

The most satisfying paid regular employment that I have ever experienced concluded on 11 November 2021. For a twelve-week course, I worked as a sessional tutor under the University of Sydney’s auspices. The tutorials – overarching title: ‘Music in Western Culture’ – catered not purely for first-year music majors, but for first-year majors in other fields too. (As I write this paragraph, there remains some essay-marking for me to complete.)

Initially, I felt overwhelming panic, thanks to the requirement for near-Lisztian virtuosity in the Zoom-PowerPoint combination. ‘Have I turned the sound on?’ ‘Have I turned it off?’ ‘Have I accidentally shared the answers to tutorial questions?’ Of the course’s first two weeks, almost no memories remain except my visceral technophobia.

Besides, what (I wondered) if my students turned out to be a monstrous regiment of snowflakes, merrily toppling the nearest Queen Victoria monument, when not ululating into their smartphones about being ‘triggered’ by my own ‘Eurocentric’, ‘cisgendered,’ ‘heteronormative’ ‘microaggressions’ and ‘cultural appropriations’ upholding ‘the patriarchy’? Could my restricted didactic aptitude ensure those ‘safe spaces’ that Homo Snowflakiens considers indispensable?

My fears proved excessive. Zoom’s malfunctions and eastern Australia’s draconian lockdowns notwithstanding, I received from students consistent politeness. Whether this resulted from good luck – or from, instead, some antecedent administrative colander by which the palpably woke had been strained out, before they could contaminate the main dish – others must determine. Possibly a third cause prevailed.

All in all, my first salaried academic occupation gave me intense pleasure. The moment when everything clicked occurred as I replayed one of the tutorials’ set pieces: a Haydn piano sonata scintillatingly performed by L’viv-born, Manhattan-based Emanuel Ax. Suddenly I realised: ‘I’m receiving federal subsidies for listening to this marvellous stuff.’

Last summer’s dirge from a prominent British musicologist, who has huffily left the discipline (short version: ‘Goodbye, cruel world’), inspires not the faintest empathetic echo in my bosom. The musicologist achieved a full professorship before he had turned thirty-eight; maybe therein lies his whole trouble. 

Yes, my job had its nuisances, principally an exasperating holdup in my wages’ arrival, plus a nasty bout of mid-term illness which required my hospitalisation (and which complicated my already overworked colleagues’ timetables). About these nuisances I shall say little, partly because I crave further university employment, but chiefly because such irritants come with fallen human nature. Erstwhile Esquire boss Arnold Gingrich cherished a magnificently orotund sentence redeeming, circa 1947, one otherwise humdrum epistle to the editor: ‘I find no fault in Esquire that I do not find with the age that produced it.’ Mutatis mutandis, this encapsulates my response to Australian academe.

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What straightaway impressed me, regarding the ‘Music in Western Culture’ course, was its predominating old-fashioned decorum. The main textbook, A History of Western Music, is but a revision – by Indiana University’s J. Peter Burkholder – of an identically named volume known earlier as ‘Palisca’ and even earlier as ‘Grout’ (after the previous versions’ respective authors: C.V. Palisca and Donald J. Grout, who died in, respectively, 2001 and 1987).

We who grew up with ‘Palisca’ and ‘Grout’ found much of Burkholder’s tome familiar. True, Burkholder cites hip-hop and sexual identity politics, as Grout would never have done; true, feminist considerations now compel coverage of female composers – Hildegard of Bingen among them – whom Palisca and Grout either underrated or omitted. These are incidentals. Aesthetic detachment marks all three musicologists: their audiences, happily, will find no clues as to which genres are the authors’ own favourites.

It scarcely requires accentuating how objectionable this dignified scholastic model is within Critical Race Theory’s snake-pit, which one Philip Ewell now inhabits. Ewell (of City University New York) bears the same relation to a conventional apparatchik like Norman Lebrecht that Wilhelm Reich bore to Freud, Foucault to Sartre, and Pol Pot to Brezhnev.

The Wuhan market, as it were, which first disseminated Ewell’s ‘thinking’ was a 2019 lecture to the blandly named Society for Music Theory, where Ewell demanded that Western music’s ‘white racial frame’ be ‘decolonised.’ (He nowhere condescended to explain who would do the decolonising. R. Kelly?) Ewell cast special opprobrium upon theorist Heinrich Schenker, a Jewish thinker never previously charged with white supremacism. Ordinary teaching of Western staff notation, teaching liable to necessitate such elitist hierarchical signifiers as ‘dominant’ and ‘subdominant,’ goaded Ewell to rage.

Timothy Jackson, a white liberal at the University of North Texas, organised a firm but courteous refutation of Ewell. This refutation – involving fifteen writers – occupied an issue of the magazine that Jackson co-edits, the Journal of Schenkerian Studies. The issue’s appearance activated frenzied calls for Jackson’s dismissal. At his references to racial slurs among Ewell’s beloved rappers, the anti-Jackson brigade took particular offence. One touch of (inadvertent) farce emerged from Ewell’s champions, when a female Canadian pundit treated the world to its least felicitous  recent neologism: she derided Schenker’s white female adherents as ‘SchenKarens.’

Throughout my own work contract, I heard not a syllable of Ewell-advocacy. This argues for some inherent common sense within the Australian university system.

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The system had other merits. On average, each of my online tutorials contained twelve students. This was (apologies for sounding Panglossian) the best of all possible class sizes. Too small a group, and a single garrulous individual can monopolise the whole hour. Too large a group encourages dumbed-down populism. The latter hazard could well plague all vast programmes aiming to save the world through one colossal music lesson.

Of the Orff and Kodály instructional methods’ details, I lack the competence to speak. Alas, no such mitigating circumstances characterise the Suzuki method, which its founder’s fake doctorate and bogus claims to Weimar Republic tuition make hard to stomach now. Nor do they characterise the Venezuela-derived El Sistema. Once viewed as the ultimate in pedagogical chic, El Sistema prompted in 2014 a devastating book-length exposé by Geoff Baker, left-wing musicologist and Guardian correspondent. Baker’s harrowing disclosures incorporate accounts of El Sistema’s explicitly erotic corruption.

So much for the New York Times feature on El Sistema (16 February 2012) with a banner typifying the method’s longstanding media hype about proletarian empowerment: ‘Fighting Poverty, Armed With Violins.’ The perfect modern validation, surely, of William Dean Howells’s acerbic epigram ‘Americans want tragedies with happy endings.’

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Naturally ‘Music in Western Culture’ was spared all carnal predators and all holders of counterfeit PhDs. My largely congenial experiences engendered my quiet, healthy scepticism towards anti-intellectual harangues from Fox News’s talking heads. Had I believed apocalyptic rhetoricians so obsessive that they could probably detect woke outrages on the planet Saturn, I would have been too scared to do my job.

Unlike those talking heads, I acutely recollect Australia’s higher education during the Cold War. This had its joys, above all Sydney’s Dr Andrew Riemer – specialist in Elizabethan-Jacobean drama – who gave the clearest, most fair-minded lectures which I have heard on any topic. (He subsequently produced memoirs as readable as, and striking deeper than, Clive James’s.)

Yet no milieu is less apt than my undergraduate youth to provoke my predispositions, themselves infinitesimally sparse, towards Golden Age nostalgia. Is woke craziness in 2021 truly more malevolent in its effects on academe than was Martin Bernal’s craziness (the briefly modish ‘Black Athena’ phantasm) in 1991? Or Sandinista craziness in 1981? Or anti-Vietnam-War craziness in 1971? Or D.H. Lawrence’s craziness in 1961? Or – lest we forget – Freudian craziness in 1951? Frankly, I doubt it. (I speak as one who, when a small and always fearful child, repeatedly wondered whether my father would get home alive after his daily encounters with draft-dodging, vandalising mobs who shrieked ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh! / The NLF is gonna win!’.)

Against several benchmarks, Australian humanities departments have improved. A trivial but significant amelioration: I marvel at how attractive their latter-day recordings of medieval music are.

Students no longer gain their formative exposures to the Middle Ages’ sounds, as I gained lots of mine forty-one years ago, through the Historical Anthology of Music  series (surface-noise-infested American LPs supplementing a primer that dated from 1946). There, every second track seemed to comprise bleating from three Teutonic nonagenarians with vibratos almost wide enough to march a platoon through. It was, furthermore, mandatory to capture the nonagenarians in an acoustic resembling someone’s broom-cupboard. Today, anyone trawling through music schools’ libraries (to say nothing of Spotify or YouTube) can find more abundant and beauteous early-music renditions inside an hour than we in 1980 could have located inside six months.

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More momentous are universities’ newish regulations for conduct. I think of those Australian academics in the 1980s – wielding influence disproportionate to their limited numbers – who at best channelled Lucky Jim Dixon, and at worst channelled Walter Mitty. Thanks in part to online packages like Turnitin, sanctions against plagiarism (whoever commits it) have teeth now, whereas in the 1980s no such sanctions existed. Admirers of that classic 1948 film The Red Shoes will appreciate the impunity with which unscrupulous teachers once thieved pupils’ material, in music as elsewhere.

Heaven knows, present-day Australian students are susceptible enough to the pernicious worldviews expounded by Peter Singer. That said, I – unlike those students – am conversant with the equally pernicious worldviews expounded by the University of Sydney’s 1927–1958 philosophy professor John Anderson: militantly anti-Christian demagogue and long-time Communist Party fellow-traveller, with compulsive unwillingness to differentiate the ontological concept of ‘female undergraduate’ from that of ‘sex toy.’ Nor was Anderson’s unwillingness unique. While the worst predation flourished amid the Age of Aquarius, as late as 1984 our juvenile gossip included a pervasive wisecrack concerning the relevant transaction: ‘a lay for an A.’ And this taxpayer-funded bonking  was, be it emphasised, entirely legal.

Some outstandingly toxic teacher-student relationships encompassed no physical acts. Wherever degrees are both rare and esteemed, opportunities for students to levy emotional blackmail against teachers (or vice versa) proliferate. Joyce Carol Oates’s short story ‘In the Region of Ice’ frighteningly depicts the inexorable persecution of a teaching nun by her male protégé.

‘Well, for good or evil’ – I here quote Chesterton’s Autobiography – ‘that is all dead.’ Manipulative teacher-student interactions will seldom eventuate when each participant is a mere flickering Zoom image to the other. Moreover, with the nation’s 1989–1992 university reforms, the droit du seigneur over female students (not to mention over female secretaries) disappeared from Australian tenured life’s fringe-benefits.

This tenured life itself – like its British counterpart – has dwindled to a rarity which in the USA is unimaginable. In 2006, one Australian lecturer told Inez Baranay, a Sydney-based novelist-essayist: ‘the area I teach in has not appointed any tenured academics in ten years.’ Undoubtedly, entrenching casual labour carries risks; in Sydney’s and Melbourne’s higher education systems, wage theft has reached alarming levels. But likewise undoubtedly, the pre-1989 antipodean routine of near-automatic tenure mollycoddled so many layabouts that it just had to be scrapped.

Australia’s sustained Cold War prosperity facilitated tenure’s abuse. The abolition of student fees in 1974, by Gough Whitlam’s government, merely reinforced the long-extant system whereby eighty per cent  of local undergraduates avoided paying fees anyhow (the University of Western Australia, in Perth, charged no fees at all). Nor, in that profligate epoch, did stringent selection criteria for staffers invariably operate. Thank goodness, arbiters of Australian students’ destinies no longer include that frequent pest from my young manhood: the rancorous idler who had not published a solitary article or, indeed, drawn a solitary sober breath since around 1960.

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Another, and unexpected, modern improvement concerns religion. Current Australian academe has got ninety-nine problems, but Freemasonry ain’t one. (Read the 1997 biography of Australia’s classics scholar F.J.H. Letters, by his widow Kathleen, if you dispute local lodges’ former influence over universities.) Whatever my attire’s shortcomings, no-one has commanded me to rectify these by procuring a leather apron.

Neither have any university personnel weaponised against me my Catholicism, shared with Letters himself, and discoverable through five minutes on Google. To Australians my age or older, such newfound tolerance of ‘papists’ is mind-boggling. We recall the longevity of a tabloid, The Rock, which for half a century after 1944 spewed Klan-style vilification against Catholicism (it greeted sponsored Italian immigrants with headlines like ‘450 Human Wogs Arrive’).

Hardly anyone admitted to reading The Rock, but that fact indicates how many liars Australia had. Because at the tabloid’s pre-Vatican-II apex, it sold 30,000 copies per issue: a remarkable total in a country with under eleven million inhabitants, and quite adequate for coercing numerous politicians into servility. Witnessing The Rock’s diatribes and their parliamentary counterparts, Scottish newspaperman John Douglas Pringle – an unbeliever – lamented: ‘Anti-Catholic feeling is extremely strong in Australia. From time to time it bursts out like lava from a sleeping volcano, burning and destroying everything it touches.’

Of course, as the mendacious campaigns against Cardinal Pell showed, this emotion has not vanished from Australia’s midst. It still governs our state police forces and schoolteachers’ unions; all of our gutter media (what are our surviving non-gutter media, pray tell?); much of our medical establishment; and much of our judiciary. Nonetheless, for whatever reason, anti-Catholic wrath now leaves New South Wales’s universities undisturbed. Without this welcome change, I could never have attained academic emolument.

Decades back, my late Sydney chaplain friend Father Paul Stenhouse once parked his car on campus, having left visible his dashboard’s Virgin Mary statuette; he returned to find the windshield smashed. These days, comparable sectarian malevolence incurs serious penalties, Twitter castigation included. Back then, had Father Stenhouse formally submitted a complaint, campus officials would have all but laughed in his face.

Cardinal Sir Norman Gilroy, Sydney’s Catholic archbishop from 1940 to 1971, had discouraged his flock from university attendance in general. What with Marian figurines being punishable by smashed windshields – and what with Anderson the bellicose Christophobe on the prowl, sizing up the female talent – the Cardinal was conceivably on to something.

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Altogether, therefore, I remain as conscious of Australian universities’ past defects as of their present ones. Whilst the latter are undeniable, I question the novelty and the immediate nature of their threat.

Incontrovertibly, it is dreadful that various full-fee-paying foreign students now graduate despite their limited spoken and written English. But even that vexation, albeit new in degree, has a prototype in kind: the Colombo Plan’s late-1950s zenith. This zenith placed academics like my father in loco parentis to numerous young Southeast Asians, who too often secured Australian degrees while insufficiently Anglophone to request a train-ticket unassisted, let alone to grasp my father’s lectures on David Hume’s metaphysics. In Dad’s own weary but eloquent aphorism: ‘the challenge is to fail.’

As for the reckless dream of higher education for all, surely the pandemic dispelled that dream faster than any libertarian think-tank could do. COVID has intensified our established dependence on couriers, cleaners, nurses, postal clerks, supermarket clerks, warehouse workers, slaughterhouse workers, aged-care workers, truck-drivers, and garbage-collectors, all of whom can acquire their specific proficiencies with not the slightest collegiate force-feeding. No First World polis can cope without these persons for twenty-four hours. Any First World polis can cope evermore without my musicological and organ-playing functions, though my school crossing function has retained since 2016 (in coronavirus-afflicted Melbourne at that) its utilitarian efficacy.

I wish to declare only this: however Augean academe’s stables might be elsewhere, my colleagues and I kept our own minuscule domain really rather neat. Hereabouts, to update Mark Twain, the death of music teaching has been greatly exaggerated. For outsiders, combating this exaggeration will rarely matter much. But if televisual pundits grew rich from proclaiming that you yourself were dead, publicising the truth would urgently matter to you and your loved ones.

Sadly, perhaps my age (I am 59) will preclude further academic employment. Yet if offered it, would I accept it? Verily I say unto you, ‘Bring it on.’