Glenn Gould - the musician - has been a significant person in my life since I discovered his piano playing in the autumn of 1978; indeed, he became an important role model at various points - despite the vast dissimilarity in our temperaments and talents.
I bought my first Glenn Gould - the double LP set of Book One of the Well-Tempered Clavier, primarily because I wanted to explore Bach on piano, and secondarily because I was intrigued by the poor reviews he invariably got from the Penguin Stereo Record Guide (the nature of the criticisms made me feel that I would like what he did).
Extremely rapidly, I began to develop an interest in Gould the Man as well as the musician; or rather, something about the way he played, when supplemented by a few scraps of knowledge of his biography and opinions, was enough to convince me that here was a fellow spirit.
I first managed to glean an impression from the liner notes on the (relatively few) LPs I could buy in England, a couple of journalistic pieces; and then, on a family visit to Toronto, I bought a precious (and expensive copy) of the first biography: Geoffrey Payzant's Glenn Gould: Music and Mind.
This crystallised what it was that magnetically-attracted me to Gould: the importance of Ecstatic Experience.
In the best of Gould's performances (a lot of them) there is an intensity of absorption which is ecstatic, and which induces a similar ecstatic absorption in me. While a student I can recall listening to a short piece - a prelude for example - at lunchtime, and feeling a swirling ecstasy, at the 'top' of my mind as I walked and worked, which lasted for some hours afterwards - and which seemed to enhance my experience of life.
This fitted with an already existing idea about the aim for my life to be lived 'at concert pitch' - a phrase which doesn't literally mean what I meant by it, and which I got from a passing comment of Hendrick Willem van Loon. In 1978 I was spending more time in solitude than ever before, and I began to realise that - as Gould said - Solitude is the pre-requisite of ecstatic experience; and which I made the central theme of my radio programme Solitude, Exile and Ecstasy -
http://solitude-exile-ecstasy.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/solitude-exile-and-ecstasy.html
My central problem was that Gould's basis for ecstasy was a genius level of creative musical performance - whereas I had no basis for any such creativity. Now, it provoked in me a (rather feeble but sustained) search for some such ability - a search variously looking at music and acting, but mostly exploring writing: poetry, prose, drama and essays and also simply writing journals.
But as an immature young man I was too easily convinced of other similarities between Gould and myself; and in particular the notion that Gould's life - as I very partially understood it at that time, which was a very idealised and abstracted version of the real thing. Gould, it is now known, spent a vast proportion of time interacting with other people - more than I do, in fact; including various romantic and sexual relationships with women.
Nonetheless ecstatic solitude, in the state of total absorption during playing and creative composition, was perhaps Gould's essential reality.
In particular, I tried to believe that a solitary life of technological interaction with 'the world' would be an ideal for me, if only I had the strength of will to embrace it - yet whenever I got anywhere near this state, I found myself extremely discouraged, lapsing into an idle and disaffected and despairing condition.
Gould never gave live performances, was an expert on recording methods, lived alone, seldom went out, and was almost constantly in the presence of mass media - TV or radio were switched-on most of the time (even during sleep), newspapers were devoured, telephone bills amounted to several average person's salaries per year.
Yet/and Gould was very productive of recordings, broadcasts, writings - he was an international figure, much discussed; and a considerable influence on ideas.
The modern world now has many people who live in what is broadly the kind of way pioneered and advocated by Glenn Gould - a world in which technology is primary and human communication is primarily mediated by technology.
But now it is here, it doesn't seem much like Gould's world - in particular ecstasy, in the sense Gould meant it, seems extremely rare.
The obvious reason is that the mass of modern people are not Glenn Gould! - and the fact is that a self-created environment in which Gould thrived, and which he found conducive to creative ecstasy; is when scaled-up and applied at a population level leads the mass of Men merely into passivity, into inattentive dissipation.
What Gould thought were general principles about the world and Men, turned-out to be at most distinctive to a like-minded minority; and were perhaps even unique to him.
Thus are geniuses often poor guides to life and living! What a genius wants - and indeed needs - may be poison to people in general.
Glenn Gould's 'Solitude Trilogy' of radio programmes are well worth detailed consideration. The Idea of North is the most famous - but the Latecomers and Quiet in the Land are both considerably better. It is worth noting that despite the name these programmes are not actually about solitude- they are about life in isolated communities (Canadian far north, Newfoundland, Mennonites) that are - to some extent- cut-off from the modern Zeitgeist.
Saturday, May 9, 2026
Five Desert Island Discs
According to the rules, the castaway can take eight records, one book (other than the Bible and Shakespeare, which are already provided) and a luxury item which must be of no practical value.
The conceit is that these should sustain life on a Desert Island, in practice the idea is to make a selection which provides pegs upon which to hang a brief biography.
I insist that my interlocutor should be the programme's originator, the gentleman-enthusiast Roy Plomley (or Roy Plum-in-the-mouth as I used to quip as a teenager).
First disc: Rossini's overture to The Thieving Magpie
This was my favourite of four overtures featured on our family's one and only classical music record when I was a young child. I used to visualize the story of the opera (as summarized on the sleeve notes) as I listened - including a part which I added-in where a cat stalked the magpie.
So it symbolizes my very happy early life, and the rhythm of its main theme - diddly dum-dum-dum daah - still has a function in being my favourite music used to wake up my wife and children - especially my daughter.
It is also a delightful piece of music; sunny, effortlessly tuneful, brilliantly orchestrated and very exciting!
Disc Two: From Steeleye Span's LP Below the Salt
One Misty Moisty Morning was the first Steeleye Span track that I heard, the first electric folk music, and it led onto the first time in my life that music became very important to me.
At the time I heard it I was, rather unhappily, 'into' underground and progressive rock music - none of which I have since regarded to with enjoyment. So I was listening to a late evening BBC radio programme which played mostly this kind of stuff - hosted by a DJ called John Peel. However, Peel had eclectic tastes and on this occasion played something from a new album by Steeleye Span: this signalled the kind of music that I had been waiting for.
Because some time earlier I had discovered Tolkien; and that had changed my life - and the implication of Tolkien seemed very much against pop and rock music, whereas Steeleye Span sang epic ballads about elves and the supernatural, earthly songs about ordinary people such as milkmaids and sailors, and played jigs and reels and other Hobbit-like dances.
Of course, they did this with un-Tolkien-like electric instruments such as guitar, bass, violin, dulcimer... but somehow that made it better, because electric folk seemed to represent the infusion of modernity by folk influences, a saving of shallow civilization by ancient thoughts - for me, then, it seemed to be the future.
Staying with Steeleye Span I moved to explore other electric folk, and other folk music of all kinds; also I discovered medieval and renaissance music- and then Bach and Telemann as the first classical composers I engaged with, at least partly because they used the Treble Recorder which I had come to like through early music and folk.
So, this Desert Island Disc of Steeleye Span represents for me that teen period of musical exploration and expansion; during which music came to occupy a more central place in my life than before or since. And although Misty Moisty is a long way from being my favourite Span track, I do still enjoy it.
Disc Five - Wagner's The Ring cycle, conducted by Solti
1979-80 was undoubtedly the apex of my musical life, and it began with listening to the complete Ring cycle of opera's by Richard Wagner - on vinyl LP and a state of the art HiFi system, with a couple of friends, following the whole thing on scores, cocooned by the sensory isolation of a soundproof room in an underground 'bunker' administered by the Music department. In between we talked and read Wagner
The impact of living and breathing the mythic world Wagner for these four days was overpowering - and the mood lasted for several weeks afterwards - I recall a walking holiday in the English Lake District with my brother when almost everything seemed to remind me of the Teutonic woods and landscape, and I was continually more-than-half-expecting to find nymphs in the streams and wicked dwarves popping out from behind rocks.
The following year I was sharing a flat with some music students, one of whom was one probably the most 'musical' person I have ever known - he later became a BBC Radio Three producer, and then bought his own concert hall and recording studio.
I attended pretty much all the classical music concerts in the city and university - selling programmes at the main concert hall to get free tickets. I sang in tow Gilbert and Sullivan shows in lead parts (high baritone/ tenor) and sang tenor in large choral works with the auditioned Newcastle Bach Choir, and in a Chamber Choir of just twelve voices which was founded by the music students (and is still going, 35 years later).
Other highlights included attending a rehearsal with Sir Charles Groves conducting Das Rheingold, giving Sir Michael Tippet a birthday present on his 75th birthday, and later attending his birthday concert in London - travelling back five hours on the overnight train to arrive in Newcastle at 05.00h and going to medical school lectures the next day after only two hours of sleep!
Outside of classical music I played folk music on the accordion - at one point accompanying an impromptu ceilidh in the depths of Northumberland playing with the Duke of Northumberland's official bagpiper, busking for the Rag charity, and playing 'Scotland the Brave' in a country dance band made up entirely of my six flatmates (accordion, clarinet, guitar, piano, snare drum and double bass) at my 21st birthday party.
I suppose this was 'living at concert pitch' - and there were plenty of other non-musical activities going-on as well; not least learning medicine; and the frenetic year was followed by a bit of a collapse of morale and optimism which took a bit of getting-out-of. Such is what happens if one comes to rely on sequential powerful external pleasurable stimuli for personal happiness - the stimuli inevitably lose their potency, and there comes a point when the dose cannot be increased any further.
As for Wagner, and the Ring cycle - I never really appreciated them again with the same depth and intensity - except for Das Rheingold, which I still regard as a magnificent and mythic achievement.
The conceit is that these should sustain life on a Desert Island, in practice the idea is to make a selection which provides pegs upon which to hang a brief biography.
I insist that my interlocutor should be the programme's originator, the gentleman-enthusiast Roy Plomley (or Roy Plum-in-the-mouth as I used to quip as a teenager).
First disc: Rossini's overture to The Thieving Magpie
This was my favourite of four overtures featured on our family's one and only classical music record when I was a young child. I used to visualize the story of the opera (as summarized on the sleeve notes) as I listened - including a part which I added-in where a cat stalked the magpie.
So it symbolizes my very happy early life, and the rhythm of its main theme - diddly dum-dum-dum daah - still has a function in being my favourite music used to wake up my wife and children - especially my daughter.
It is also a delightful piece of music; sunny, effortlessly tuneful, brilliantly orchestrated and very exciting!
Disc Two: From Steeleye Span's LP Below the Salt
At the time I heard it I was, rather unhappily, 'into' underground and progressive rock music - none of which I have since regarded to with enjoyment. So I was listening to a late evening BBC radio programme which played mostly this kind of stuff - hosted by a DJ called John Peel. However, Peel had eclectic tastes and on this occasion played something from a new album by Steeleye Span: this signalled the kind of music that I had been waiting for.
Because some time earlier I had discovered Tolkien; and that had changed my life - and the implication of Tolkien seemed very much against pop and rock music, whereas Steeleye Span sang epic ballads about elves and the supernatural, earthly songs about ordinary people such as milkmaids and sailors, and played jigs and reels and other Hobbit-like dances.
Of course, they did this with un-Tolkien-like electric instruments such as guitar, bass, violin, dulcimer... but somehow that made it better, because electric folk seemed to represent the infusion of modernity by folk influences, a saving of shallow civilization by ancient thoughts - for me, then, it seemed to be the future.
Staying with Steeleye Span I moved to explore other electric folk, and other folk music of all kinds; also I discovered medieval and renaissance music- and then Bach and Telemann as the first classical composers I engaged with, at least partly because they used the Treble Recorder which I had come to like through early music and folk.
So, this Desert Island Disc of Steeleye Span represents for me that teen period of musical exploration and expansion; during which music came to occupy a more central place in my life than before or since. And although Misty Moisty is a long way from being my favourite Span track, I do still enjoy it.
Disc Three - Mozart's The Magic Flute, conducted by Solti
I did not touch the sublime in music until I experienced opera in my mid-teens - and the first time that opera hit me with full force was in watching TV.
There were two: the funniest opera - The Barber of Seville by Rossini, in the performance conducted by Claudio Abbado and starring Berganza, Alva and Prey; and then there was Ingmar Bergman's Swedish-language movie version of the best opera/ the best piece of music ever written - namely Mozart's Magic Flute.
When I got from the record library the Magic Flute excerpts conducted by Georg Solti I felt for myself musical greatness - as in the above-linked performance of Sarastro by the gigantic Finnish Bass Martti Talvela.
This is music which Bernard Shaw, the greatest British music critic of his day (as a young man) said was the only music which it would seem appropriate to hear from the mouth of God.
Mozart's Magic Flute is both the simplest and easiest, most child-like of the canonical operas, and also the deepest, most heavenly. Through its five contrasting main characters it touches on the most important human emotions and types - Tamino, the heroic poet; Papageno, the earthy, lusty, family-loving Everyman; Pamina the innocent maiden; Sarastro the noble sage; and Queen of the Night, the beautiful, insightful, gifted, proud demon.
Bergman's film version is not just the best of all opera films, and a fine musical rendering (with good although not great singers) - but Bergman's subtle reworking of Schikaneder's inspired but chaotic libretto matches more closely the depth of the music with the words. For instance, Bergman unforgettably makes Sarastro into Pamina's father - which makes perfect dramatic symmetry.
The role of the Magic Flute in my life was spiritual, as well as aesthetic. I recognized, but struggled to make sense of, the vision of something higher and beyond. It is to my credit that despite professed atheism I did not reductively explain-away this experience of the transcendent - but unsuccessfully tried to articulate it within my covert and imprecise belief in Creative Evolution (a doctrine which was also derived from Bernard Shaw - especially as it was put-forth in my favourite play of that time: Shaw's Man and Superman, an explicitly Mozartian drama).
My enjoyment of The Magic Flute and Barber of Seville led onto an intense period of opera exploration on LP recordings, with the vital assistance of the Bristol City library - such that over the next four year I listened to the whole of the canonical opera repertoire from the classical and romantic era. Sometimes I was seeking aesthetic experience, often it was a love of singing - especially technical aspects of the tenor voice.
Music, especially opera, became a serious activity: a religious activity. As often as not I would borrow a musical score of the opera - and read that as I listened; if not, I would follow the libretto; and while I listened my focus was intense - I would not be doing anything else.
Naturally I wanted to participate in this world of classical music, and did so in the only way I could - by singing in choirs and choruses, and on my own at home - which was unsatisfying but better than nothing. I had vague, unformed, but important-to-me notions of doing something musical more seriously at some point - perhaps being a music critic.
The best of Classical Music, especially opera, was the highest thing I knew, and I deeply wanted to be 'inside' it - somehow.
But at the same time I always held back from commitment, somehow knowing that even if the luck went my way; music could not provide me, with my nature as it was, and very limited aptitude and inadequate training, with what I sought.
There were two: the funniest opera - The Barber of Seville by Rossini, in the performance conducted by Claudio Abbado and starring Berganza, Alva and Prey; and then there was Ingmar Bergman's Swedish-language movie version of the best opera/ the best piece of music ever written - namely Mozart's Magic Flute.
When I got from the record library the Magic Flute excerpts conducted by Georg Solti I felt for myself musical greatness - as in the above-linked performance of Sarastro by the gigantic Finnish Bass Martti Talvela.
This is music which Bernard Shaw, the greatest British music critic of his day (as a young man) said was the only music which it would seem appropriate to hear from the mouth of God.
Mozart's Magic Flute is both the simplest and easiest, most child-like of the canonical operas, and also the deepest, most heavenly. Through its five contrasting main characters it touches on the most important human emotions and types - Tamino, the heroic poet; Papageno, the earthy, lusty, family-loving Everyman; Pamina the innocent maiden; Sarastro the noble sage; and Queen of the Night, the beautiful, insightful, gifted, proud demon.
Bergman's film version is not just the best of all opera films, and a fine musical rendering (with good although not great singers) - but Bergman's subtle reworking of Schikaneder's inspired but chaotic libretto matches more closely the depth of the music with the words. For instance, Bergman unforgettably makes Sarastro into Pamina's father - which makes perfect dramatic symmetry.
The role of the Magic Flute in my life was spiritual, as well as aesthetic. I recognized, but struggled to make sense of, the vision of something higher and beyond. It is to my credit that despite professed atheism I did not reductively explain-away this experience of the transcendent - but unsuccessfully tried to articulate it within my covert and imprecise belief in Creative Evolution (a doctrine which was also derived from Bernard Shaw - especially as it was put-forth in my favourite play of that time: Shaw's Man and Superman, an explicitly Mozartian drama).
My enjoyment of The Magic Flute and Barber of Seville led onto an intense period of opera exploration on LP recordings, with the vital assistance of the Bristol City library - such that over the next four year I listened to the whole of the canonical opera repertoire from the classical and romantic era. Sometimes I was seeking aesthetic experience, often it was a love of singing - especially technical aspects of the tenor voice.
Music, especially opera, became a serious activity: a religious activity. As often as not I would borrow a musical score of the opera - and read that as I listened; if not, I would follow the libretto; and while I listened my focus was intense - I would not be doing anything else.
Naturally I wanted to participate in this world of classical music, and did so in the only way I could - by singing in choirs and choruses, and on my own at home - which was unsatisfying but better than nothing. I had vague, unformed, but important-to-me notions of doing something musical more seriously at some point - perhaps being a music critic.
The best of Classical Music, especially opera, was the highest thing I knew, and I deeply wanted to be 'inside' it - somehow.
But at the same time I always held back from commitment, somehow knowing that even if the luck went my way; music could not provide me, with my nature as it was, and very limited aptitude and inadequate training, with what I sought.
Disc Four - Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, played by Glenn Gould
When I attended a comedy revue and Hamlet parody called Hamalongayorick at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1978, I enjoyed the interval music in which a jazz piano trio played Bach - and soon afterwards I bought an LP of Jaques Loussier's jazz trio (which was presumably being emulated); but also Glenn Gould playing Bach's Well Tempered Clavier Book One.
Buying this double album was a double act of rebellion, since until then I had been a purist who insisted on Bach on harpsichord (and who indeed indeed was mildly hostile to the piano); and a rebel also in buying Glenn Gould's performance since the British musical establishment were barely aware of him, but when his performances were reviewed in The Gramophone they were usually given only two stars (out of five) due to their many eccentricities.
Insofar as the British establishment knew of Gould, they were hostile- and focused only on spiteful gossip. For example there was a false rumour that the fugues on his recording of the Bach 48 Preludes and Fugues had been recorded multi-tracked, with Gould playing one voice at a time. Of course, this was inadvertently very high praise of his ability to perform counterpoint!
But Gould and Bach's keyboard work provided my first serious, long term, and still-enduring instrumental obsession in classical music. I will listen to these pieces by Bach performedby many artists, on many instruments and combinations. And as for Glenn Gould... there were periods over the next few years when Gould - both his performances, and his example, became almost a life-line to me: a model of how I hoped, ideally, to live.
I have many memories of solitary times in various places (including Toronto - Gould's home city) listening to Gould and Bach with a luminous note-by-note intensity; projecting myself into that musical world as a place of detailed meaning and exalted inspiration.
At first I had to mail order Gould's LPs because they were not stocked by British shops, I bought some more on trips to the USA and Canada - but by the time he died four year later Gould had become almost a household name - and his star has continued to rise for many years. I even contributed a small piece to the edifice of his posthumous fame:
http://solitude-exile-ecstasy.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/solitude-exile-and-ecstasy.html
I find Bach's pieces, and especially (most of) Gould's performances, are just about the only music that never stales for me, no matter how many repetations - probably because its appeal is rather subtle and deep, so I never feel close to plumbing the depths.
Its appeal is also ascetic, monastic; and this is the best music for the enjoyment of solitude - even if that solitude was a moment grabbed from an over busy life, in a tiny room in a tower block in a city... Gould and Bach can make it as deserted as an island.
Buying this double album was a double act of rebellion, since until then I had been a purist who insisted on Bach on harpsichord (and who indeed indeed was mildly hostile to the piano); and a rebel also in buying Glenn Gould's performance since the British musical establishment were barely aware of him, but when his performances were reviewed in The Gramophone they were usually given only two stars (out of five) due to their many eccentricities.
Insofar as the British establishment knew of Gould, they were hostile- and focused only on spiteful gossip. For example there was a false rumour that the fugues on his recording of the Bach 48 Preludes and Fugues had been recorded multi-tracked, with Gould playing one voice at a time. Of course, this was inadvertently very high praise of his ability to perform counterpoint!
But Gould and Bach's keyboard work provided my first serious, long term, and still-enduring instrumental obsession in classical music. I will listen to these pieces by Bach performedby many artists, on many instruments and combinations. And as for Glenn Gould... there were periods over the next few years when Gould - both his performances, and his example, became almost a life-line to me: a model of how I hoped, ideally, to live.
I have many memories of solitary times in various places (including Toronto - Gould's home city) listening to Gould and Bach with a luminous note-by-note intensity; projecting myself into that musical world as a place of detailed meaning and exalted inspiration.
At first I had to mail order Gould's LPs because they were not stocked by British shops, I bought some more on trips to the USA and Canada - but by the time he died four year later Gould had become almost a household name - and his star has continued to rise for many years. I even contributed a small piece to the edifice of his posthumous fame:
http://solitude-exile-ecstasy.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/solitude-exile-and-ecstasy.html
I find Bach's pieces, and especially (most of) Gould's performances, are just about the only music that never stales for me, no matter how many repetations - probably because its appeal is rather subtle and deep, so I never feel close to plumbing the depths.
Its appeal is also ascetic, monastic; and this is the best music for the enjoyment of solitude - even if that solitude was a moment grabbed from an over busy life, in a tiny room in a tower block in a city... Gould and Bach can make it as deserted as an island.
Disc Five - Wagner's The Ring cycle, conducted by Solti
1979-80 was undoubtedly the apex of my musical life, and it began with listening to the complete Ring cycle of opera's by Richard Wagner - on vinyl LP and a state of the art HiFi system, with a couple of friends, following the whole thing on scores, cocooned by the sensory isolation of a soundproof room in an underground 'bunker' administered by the Music department. In between we talked and read Wagner
The impact of living and breathing the mythic world Wagner for these four days was overpowering - and the mood lasted for several weeks afterwards - I recall a walking holiday in the English Lake District with my brother when almost everything seemed to remind me of the Teutonic woods and landscape, and I was continually more-than-half-expecting to find nymphs in the streams and wicked dwarves popping out from behind rocks.
The following year I was sharing a flat with some music students, one of whom was one probably the most 'musical' person I have ever known - he later became a BBC Radio Three producer, and then bought his own concert hall and recording studio.
I attended pretty much all the classical music concerts in the city and university - selling programmes at the main concert hall to get free tickets. I sang in tow Gilbert and Sullivan shows in lead parts (high baritone/ tenor) and sang tenor in large choral works with the auditioned Newcastle Bach Choir, and in a Chamber Choir of just twelve voices which was founded by the music students (and is still going, 35 years later).
Other highlights included attending a rehearsal with Sir Charles Groves conducting Das Rheingold, giving Sir Michael Tippet a birthday present on his 75th birthday, and later attending his birthday concert in London - travelling back five hours on the overnight train to arrive in Newcastle at 05.00h and going to medical school lectures the next day after only two hours of sleep!
Outside of classical music I played folk music on the accordion - at one point accompanying an impromptu ceilidh in the depths of Northumberland playing with the Duke of Northumberland's official bagpiper, busking for the Rag charity, and playing 'Scotland the Brave' in a country dance band made up entirely of my six flatmates (accordion, clarinet, guitar, piano, snare drum and double bass) at my 21st birthday party.
I suppose this was 'living at concert pitch' - and there were plenty of other non-musical activities going-on as well; not least learning medicine; and the frenetic year was followed by a bit of a collapse of morale and optimism which took a bit of getting-out-of. Such is what happens if one comes to rely on sequential powerful external pleasurable stimuli for personal happiness - the stimuli inevitably lose their potency, and there comes a point when the dose cannot be increased any further.
As for Wagner, and the Ring cycle - I never really appreciated them again with the same depth and intensity - except for Das Rheingold, which I still regard as a magnificent and mythic achievement.
I never got beyond choosing these five Desert Island Discs, although there were supposed to be eight (according to the rule) - perhaps because, after 1980 and The Ring, no music ever had quite the same impact.
Piano transcriptions of Beethoven Symphonies
Almost everybody who likes classical music rapidly listens to Beethoven's nine symphonies - buys recordings, picks out their special favourites - and then listens then to death!
Eventually what Colin Wilson terms 'the robot' in our minds takes over listening to Beethoven Symphonies it can become hard to listen afresh.
Well, one way to renew the experience is to listen to Liszt's piano transcriptions which bring out whole new aspects of the pieces, with a wonderful clarity, lyricism and excitement.
Glenn Gould played a few, including the wondrous Pastoral (number 6) :
And some kind person has put ALL of the transcribed symphonies on YouTube played by a chap called Cyprien Katsaris who has a real feel for this music. Here is number 5 - Daa-Da-Da Daaah:
So which are my favourites?
1. Number 3 the Eroica. One of my very favourite pieces of music of all, one of the most significant pieces of music ever written. Exciting, optimistic, delicious, noble and superbly adept and innovative.
I love the first and last movements especially. (Actually this one does go significantly better with full orchestra - but I love the alternative tonic dominant end cadences on piano).
2. Number 6 the Pastoral. The first one I liked, a joy from first to last, and a wonder indeed.
These two above the rest - and all the others I like except... number 9, the contrived and clunky 'choral' symphony; which I usually don't enjoy much, except for the short tenor solo in an otherwise mostly raucous and shrill finale.
Still - in the piano transcription you can escape the endlessly shrieking sopranos...!
**
Note: In general, and with one shining exception, I do not agree with the sophisticated view that 'late' Beethoven is the best - I find the late stuff to be too constipated; Beethoven is trying too hard to overcome the loss of his lyrical facility and being too consciously experimental and innovative. The shining exception is the Piano Sonata number 32in C minor Opus 111 - the second 'variations' movement is simply one of the most wonderful things ever written by anybody; as was recognized by Thomas Mann who put a whole chapter analysing it into his novel Doktor Faustus. But as a rule I accept the common consent of the middlebrow concert-going, record-buying masses that the best Beethoven is in his 'middle' period.
Eventually what Colin Wilson terms 'the robot' in our minds takes over listening to Beethoven Symphonies it can become hard to listen afresh.
Well, one way to renew the experience is to listen to Liszt's piano transcriptions which bring out whole new aspects of the pieces, with a wonderful clarity, lyricism and excitement.
Glenn Gould played a few, including the wondrous Pastoral (number 6) :
And some kind person has put ALL of the transcribed symphonies on YouTube played by a chap called Cyprien Katsaris who has a real feel for this music. Here is number 5 - Daa-Da-Da Daaah:
So which are my favourites?
1. Number 3 the Eroica. One of my very favourite pieces of music of all, one of the most significant pieces of music ever written. Exciting, optimistic, delicious, noble and superbly adept and innovative.
I love the first and last movements especially. (Actually this one does go significantly better with full orchestra - but I love the alternative tonic dominant end cadences on piano).
2. Number 6 the Pastoral. The first one I liked, a joy from first to last, and a wonder indeed.
These two above the rest - and all the others I like except... number 9, the contrived and clunky 'choral' symphony; which I usually don't enjoy much, except for the short tenor solo in an otherwise mostly raucous and shrill finale.
Still - in the piano transcription you can escape the endlessly shrieking sopranos...!
**
Note: In general, and with one shining exception, I do not agree with the sophisticated view that 'late' Beethoven is the best - I find the late stuff to be too constipated; Beethoven is trying too hard to overcome the loss of his lyrical facility and being too consciously experimental and innovative. The shining exception is the Piano Sonata number 32in C minor Opus 111 - the second 'variations' movement is simply one of the most wonderful things ever written by anybody; as was recognized by Thomas Mann who put a whole chapter analysing it into his novel Doktor Faustus. But as a rule I accept the common consent of the middlebrow concert-going, record-buying masses that the best Beethoven is in his 'middle' period.
Thursday, May 7, 2026
Music in my early life
My first musical instrument, at age ten, was a ukelele - the one that looks like a little guitar - and it cost one pound and one shilling; bought for me on impulse by my Dad, unplanned, from a shop in Bristol. It came with George Formby guide on how to play it.
Within days or weeks my then group of friends had formed a 'pop group' which we called The Shades. We wore sunglasses (naturally!), flared trousers and brightly coloured nylon shirts with cravats.
The Shades comprised an electric and pneumatic reed organ (which sounded like a motorised accordion), a steel strung acoustic guitar, ukelele and maracas - we had no amplification.
With such a bizarre line-up, I can only attribute our success to the musicality of the organ player - who could compose, arrange, and improvise a bit; and also that we must have had nice treble voices', because it was not long before we were playing 'concerts'.
We even played at the main Church service on Sundays - which was probably a couple of hundred people; and 'entertained' the old folks at the nearby residential home.
We were canny enough to fit the material to the audience, and I recall playing and singing such contemporary worship classics as Lord of the Dance and Kumbayah in front of a full house with that nervelessness and sense of entitlement of the pre-adolescent; and an old time song called 'After the Ball' which we learned for the Old Folk.
By this time I had upgraded from ukelele to ukelele banjo - which was much louder and cost five times as much (i.e. five pounds).
Then, with terrible swiftness, we recapitulated that typical late 1960s trajectory by electrifying and becoming 'progressive'...
The old, old, and typically 'sixties, story: loss of innocence - corruption interpreted as sophistication.
We stopped calling ourselves a pop group and claimed now to be Rock - we changed our name from 'The Shades' to ...Quarternion (meaning a group of four... clever, yes? That one came from our intellectual organist); and we learned a couple of heavy numbers including the 'meaningful' (a word we actually used) Child of Time as played by Deep Purple.
We listened to the Woodstock live album. We worried about the Vietnam War - or was it the Viet-man war? We became tortured artists with a social mission and a keen interest in girls.
We plugged our instruments into on old valve radio which served as combined amplifier and loudspeaker - well 'amplify' and 'loud' did not really come into it: this particular radio was apparently designed for a wartime family to gather around and listen to Churchill's stirring rhetoric, rather than creating a 'wall of sound'.
The electronic organ remained, but we added an electric 'lead' guitar (the classic Avon budget model, purchased from the Kay's catalogue), and I switched to playing 'bass' on the lower strings of another ordinary electric guitar - the whole being sustained by the solid beat of the same old maracas rhythm section...
I quit before it got to the stage of peace-and-love-ins, Hari Krishna, drugs and overdoses.
No, we never did get a drum kit. And no microphones. To be honest, you don't need a microphone to make your voice heard over the sound of a 1945 radiogram, a pneumatic organ and maracas.
Some years later, and mmediately before my Tolkien era there was a brief period - a few months, maybe half a year - when I began to be pulled-into the mainstream world of youth groupings and cults; and I was in danger of becoming normal.
(Normal, that is, for a thirteen year old boy at that time and place.)
There are a few residual signs of this. A single photograph of me standing in a family group with 'long' hair - that is to say, halfway down my ears, and beginning to curl-up like a watch spring. Curling-up, that is, despite my best efforts; which included washing my hair just before bed-time, plastering it down flat, then sleeping the night in a woollen balaclava helmet.
This photo also depicts me wearing a lavender coloured T-shirt and 'Loon' pants - which were denim jeans tight to the knee, then with a V-knee seam and the bottoms flaring out to 24 inches so they would completely cover and conceal the shoes - which were baseball boots.
All this indicates I was trying to be a Hairy - which was the slang term for the contemporary incarnation of 'Hippies' and devotees of 'Heavy' or Progressive Rock; and what confirms the interpretation is my head-hanging-forward, round-shouldered stance - as immortalised by Shaggy in the Scooby-Doo cartoons.
The Progressive Rock craze incorporated groups such as Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd and (from the USA) Mountain - we listened to these (borrowed from a friend's older brother) on a little portable record player supervised by an older kid who wore black velvet 'Flares' (a less extreme version of Loons) as part of his school uniform - but who had spent so much time slapping his thighs in response to 'the beat' that he had oval bare-patches on the front of the trousers. We therefore nicknamed him Frix, which was short-for Friction Pants.
Also, I attended a few school discos in the evenings (which I never did in later years); where I stood around trying to appear sophisticated by holding my chin in my cupped hand - even though I was standing-up. This was something I had seen being done by Steve Peregrine Took - who played bongos next to Marc Bolan in the Tyrannosaurus Rex combo. I believed it made me look thoughtful, enigmatic and sophisticated; so that girls would be compelled to come up and ask me what was on my mind.
The only part of the discos I actually enjoyed was dancing to the Hawkwind single of Silver Machine with the strobe lights on - which caused a dissociative trance state.
This led to what later stood as an anomalous album by Hawkwind nestled in my accumulation of Long Playing records. I tried hard to like it, especially having spent so much pocket money on it; but something about the music, the graphics and the text actually sickened me, and after a while I just hid it away and pretended it didn't exist.
Most of the music I listed to was recorded 'live', on a tiny portable cassette tape player, from friends albums - but after a few months hard usage, these cassettes would get slower and slower, then jam solid and become useless.
I also tuned into late night radio, lying in bed with my little transistor and single earplug, when the likes of John Peel and Bob Harris would play the latest exotica from the edge of Rock - which was in these early 1970s at the most pretentious level it ever attained - as epitomised by the double or triple LP 'concept album', and the inclusion of ten minute improvised solos on bass guitar, or drums.
Heavy Rock on a tranny via a tinny earplug does sound like a contradiction in terms - the apparatus was only a small step-up from a crystal set - but this was irrelevant, because the whole thing was almost entirely a symbolic gesture of belonging to 'youth'.
When I first read Tolkien - which was sometime after I turned thirteen, it was a turning-point for me.
Cause and effect, no doubt, run both ways - I was at this point developmentally pre-prepared to read Tolkien, and Tolkien also had a permanent effect on me.
First it was The Hobbit. I held-off reading Lord of the Rings because I liked The Hobbit so much, and resented the idea of a book which did not have Bilbo as its main hero - but in the end curiosity, and satiety with re-reading The Hobbit - pushed me on to Lord of the Rings. The rest is history.
It was at about this time, as I was walking down The Main Road of the village, that I felt a change in myself - in my mind. It resembled the description given by some patients with schizophrenia who describe being in a perplexed state for a while - knowing something is going on that concerns them, but not what it is - then suddenly, in a wave of (apparent) insight, finding everything made clear.
With me it was a bit like waking-up, becoming aware of myself and the surroundings. The dawn of self-consciousness.
This never happened again - so I suppose that this was my experience of the process of mentally becoming 'an adult' - although physically I still had a couple of years to wait. I knew at the time it was significant, and I also knew the significance - that I had 'grown-up' inside - in terms of the essential core.
Since then 'me' has always been 'me' - and my pre-thirteen year old self is somewhat hazy, somewhat alien.
Four the next four and some years at school, my inner life was dominated by Tolkien's world, and by the implications I drew from it. As well as reading and re-reading and pondering - the Tolkien interest propelled me into other fascinations. After quite a long period of moths just immersing myself in Lord of the Rings - I turned my attention outward to seek something similar, something which expanded and extended the things I drew from that world.
I decided to read adult's literature; our house was full of good books - so I asked my Father for advice. I began with George Bernard Shaw's various works beginning with Androcles and the Lion and Everybody's Political What's What, and Robert's Grave's I Claudius/ Claudius the God novels.
This was the start of the Culture Vulture years - 13-21 especially, when I attacked The Western Tradition with great energy and a retentive memory; limited (it seems) more by constraints of availability than of time.
The house was full of Good Books, there was a small (one medium-sized room) but well-stocked village library, and I was soon going into Bristol to swim among the endless stacks of the City library. I had the good fortune of a well-trained and enthusiastic English teacher from whom I learned to read Middle English and appreciate Shakespearian language - which opened-up 600 years of literature.
(I also borrowed a copy of Sweet's Anglo Saxon primer to try and add another chunk of time to my appreciation - but I could not make head or tail of it. Some people manage to 'teach themselves' languages; I have always been a mediocre linguist.)
Bristol had probably the best professional theatre outside London, and another teacher would take groups in a minibus during the evenings to see pretty much everything they did - so I began to accumulate an experience of plays - old and new.
Classical music took a while to kick-in. For quite a while I was mainly interested in Folk Music, and what little 'Medieval' (including Tudor) music I could hear - but an interest in the Recorder led to Bach and Telemann and then to the vast world of the Baroque and Classical eras (I was not so keen on later stuff, and still am not), and Gilbert and Sullivan led to Grand Opera which I would borrow in boxed LP sets from the City Library - by the time I finished school I had heard pretty much the whole of the pre-20th century standard repertoire, quite a bit of it followed with libretto or score (which could also be borrowed from the library).
All this cultural devouring was done on my own and for my own satisfaction - in some way. I didn't really have anybody to talk with about it - my best friend followed me quite a bit of the way, but he didn't want to analyse things in the way that I did. This led me to the secondary literature - criticism, scholarship, opinion, reviews and the like.
This was where I was, and am, different. Lots of people listen to classical music - but not many (except professionals) read books on the subject, its history, structure, biographies. Lots of people read novels or watch plays, not so many read about novels novels - and read plays and also literary essays - and biographies (plural) or the writers.
Clearly I was seeking more than diversion. Clearly, for me, it was a matter of trying to go inside the arts - and not simply in a practical way (by acting in plays and singing in classical pieces) but in a more philosophical way, indeed in a religious way: to get inside the world view of classical music, literature and so on, and in fact to stay there.
For me, High Culture was a religion. My hope was that my life and abilities would turn-out to be such that - eventually - I would be able to live inside literature and music, and see the world from that place; I would be inside - protected and sustained - and looking-out; and that that world would provide me with the necessities - work and love; money and status and enjoyable activity and human relationships.
There was little of this for the external observer to see - in the sense that this probably looked like a Hobby; recreation from my 'real' work of studying, passing exams and later training as a doctor.
But it wasn't - for me it was the most important thing because it was my hope of happiness, lacking any other religion it was my only hope - it was real life.
Anyway, by good sense or good fortune, I was rescued from this path by Tolkien; who triggered changes that made me step outside of the world of mainstream youth culture and into something altogether larger, more suited to my nature, and more nourishing.
Around half a decade later; I listened to Wagner's opera sequence The Ring.
It was a memorable event, scheduled to come immediately after my medical school examinations but before I got the results. My companions were two music students - and they-block booked one of the sound-proofed studios in the bowels of the music department annexe - and all four volumes of the boxed set of The Ring in the famous 1958-65 version conducted by George Solti and featuring the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.
We therefore listened to these LPs on state-of the-art stereo, following the whole thing on scores, and with intense concentration. In the gaps between sections or operas, we continued to socialize, eat meals together, and discuss the operas; or else were reading books about Wagner.
Altogether it was a rather overwhelming experience, and I was dazedly wandering in a Wagnerian world for the next few months - whether walking in the Lake District, sweeping the corridors and cleaning toilets in a psychiatric hospital (as a summer job), or immersing myself in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
However, I have never done the same again - for the very good reason that the last part of Siegfried and the whole of Gotterdammerung were extremely disappointing to me as the supposed culmination of the cycle - being at a lower level musically, dramatically and spiritually than what preceded.
Indeed, my general feeling is that, qua opera, the first is the best - The Rhinegold; which has a visceral mythic power and unity. Some of the music in Valkyrie and Siegfried is more powerfully moving and appealing - but at a cost of some underlying incoherence. So my practice has been to listen to Rhinegold complete from time to time, but only to chunks of the second and third, and never again to the fourth.
Within days or weeks my then group of friends had formed a 'pop group' which we called The Shades. We wore sunglasses (naturally!), flared trousers and brightly coloured nylon shirts with cravats.
The Shades comprised an electric and pneumatic reed organ (which sounded like a motorised accordion), a steel strung acoustic guitar, ukelele and maracas - we had no amplification.
With such a bizarre line-up, I can only attribute our success to the musicality of the organ player - who could compose, arrange, and improvise a bit; and also that we must have had nice treble voices', because it was not long before we were playing 'concerts'.
We even played at the main Church service on Sundays - which was probably a couple of hundred people; and 'entertained' the old folks at the nearby residential home.
We were canny enough to fit the material to the audience, and I recall playing and singing such contemporary worship classics as Lord of the Dance and Kumbayah in front of a full house with that nervelessness and sense of entitlement of the pre-adolescent; and an old time song called 'After the Ball' which we learned for the Old Folk.
By this time I had upgraded from ukelele to ukelele banjo - which was much louder and cost five times as much (i.e. five pounds).
Then, with terrible swiftness, we recapitulated that typical late 1960s trajectory by electrifying and becoming 'progressive'...
The old, old, and typically 'sixties, story: loss of innocence - corruption interpreted as sophistication.
We stopped calling ourselves a pop group and claimed now to be Rock - we changed our name from 'The Shades' to ...Quarternion (meaning a group of four... clever, yes? That one came from our intellectual organist); and we learned a couple of heavy numbers including the 'meaningful' (a word we actually used) Child of Time as played by Deep Purple.
We listened to the Woodstock live album. We worried about the Vietnam War - or was it the Viet-man war? We became tortured artists with a social mission and a keen interest in girls.
We plugged our instruments into on old valve radio which served as combined amplifier and loudspeaker - well 'amplify' and 'loud' did not really come into it: this particular radio was apparently designed for a wartime family to gather around and listen to Churchill's stirring rhetoric, rather than creating a 'wall of sound'.
The electronic organ remained, but we added an electric 'lead' guitar (the classic Avon budget model, purchased from the Kay's catalogue), and I switched to playing 'bass' on the lower strings of another ordinary electric guitar - the whole being sustained by the solid beat of the same old maracas rhythm section...
I quit before it got to the stage of peace-and-love-ins, Hari Krishna, drugs and overdoses.
No, we never did get a drum kit. And no microphones. To be honest, you don't need a microphone to make your voice heard over the sound of a 1945 radiogram, a pneumatic organ and maracas.
Some years later, and mmediately before my Tolkien era there was a brief period - a few months, maybe half a year - when I began to be pulled-into the mainstream world of youth groupings and cults; and I was in danger of becoming normal.
(Normal, that is, for a thirteen year old boy at that time and place.)
There are a few residual signs of this. A single photograph of me standing in a family group with 'long' hair - that is to say, halfway down my ears, and beginning to curl-up like a watch spring. Curling-up, that is, despite my best efforts; which included washing my hair just before bed-time, plastering it down flat, then sleeping the night in a woollen balaclava helmet.
This photo also depicts me wearing a lavender coloured T-shirt and 'Loon' pants - which were denim jeans tight to the knee, then with a V-knee seam and the bottoms flaring out to 24 inches so they would completely cover and conceal the shoes - which were baseball boots.
All this indicates I was trying to be a Hairy - which was the slang term for the contemporary incarnation of 'Hippies' and devotees of 'Heavy' or Progressive Rock; and what confirms the interpretation is my head-hanging-forward, round-shouldered stance - as immortalised by Shaggy in the Scooby-Doo cartoons.
The Progressive Rock craze incorporated groups such as Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd and (from the USA) Mountain - we listened to these (borrowed from a friend's older brother) on a little portable record player supervised by an older kid who wore black velvet 'Flares' (a less extreme version of Loons) as part of his school uniform - but who had spent so much time slapping his thighs in response to 'the beat' that he had oval bare-patches on the front of the trousers. We therefore nicknamed him Frix, which was short-for Friction Pants.
Also, I attended a few school discos in the evenings (which I never did in later years); where I stood around trying to appear sophisticated by holding my chin in my cupped hand - even though I was standing-up. This was something I had seen being done by Steve Peregrine Took - who played bongos next to Marc Bolan in the Tyrannosaurus Rex combo. I believed it made me look thoughtful, enigmatic and sophisticated; so that girls would be compelled to come up and ask me what was on my mind.
The only part of the discos I actually enjoyed was dancing to the Hawkwind single of Silver Machine with the strobe lights on - which caused a dissociative trance state.
This led to what later stood as an anomalous album by Hawkwind nestled in my accumulation of Long Playing records. I tried hard to like it, especially having spent so much pocket money on it; but something about the music, the graphics and the text actually sickened me, and after a while I just hid it away and pretended it didn't exist.
Most of the music I listed to was recorded 'live', on a tiny portable cassette tape player, from friends albums - but after a few months hard usage, these cassettes would get slower and slower, then jam solid and become useless.
I also tuned into late night radio, lying in bed with my little transistor and single earplug, when the likes of John Peel and Bob Harris would play the latest exotica from the edge of Rock - which was in these early 1970s at the most pretentious level it ever attained - as epitomised by the double or triple LP 'concept album', and the inclusion of ten minute improvised solos on bass guitar, or drums.
Heavy Rock on a tranny via a tinny earplug does sound like a contradiction in terms - the apparatus was only a small step-up from a crystal set - but this was irrelevant, because the whole thing was almost entirely a symbolic gesture of belonging to 'youth'.
When I first read Tolkien - which was sometime after I turned thirteen, it was a turning-point for me.
Cause and effect, no doubt, run both ways - I was at this point developmentally pre-prepared to read Tolkien, and Tolkien also had a permanent effect on me.
First it was The Hobbit. I held-off reading Lord of the Rings because I liked The Hobbit so much, and resented the idea of a book which did not have Bilbo as its main hero - but in the end curiosity, and satiety with re-reading The Hobbit - pushed me on to Lord of the Rings. The rest is history.
It was at about this time, as I was walking down The Main Road of the village, that I felt a change in myself - in my mind. It resembled the description given by some patients with schizophrenia who describe being in a perplexed state for a while - knowing something is going on that concerns them, but not what it is - then suddenly, in a wave of (apparent) insight, finding everything made clear.
With me it was a bit like waking-up, becoming aware of myself and the surroundings. The dawn of self-consciousness.
This never happened again - so I suppose that this was my experience of the process of mentally becoming 'an adult' - although physically I still had a couple of years to wait. I knew at the time it was significant, and I also knew the significance - that I had 'grown-up' inside - in terms of the essential core.
Since then 'me' has always been 'me' - and my pre-thirteen year old self is somewhat hazy, somewhat alien.
Four the next four and some years at school, my inner life was dominated by Tolkien's world, and by the implications I drew from it. As well as reading and re-reading and pondering - the Tolkien interest propelled me into other fascinations. After quite a long period of moths just immersing myself in Lord of the Rings - I turned my attention outward to seek something similar, something which expanded and extended the things I drew from that world.
I decided to read adult's literature; our house was full of good books - so I asked my Father for advice. I began with George Bernard Shaw's various works beginning with Androcles and the Lion and Everybody's Political What's What, and Robert's Grave's I Claudius/ Claudius the God novels.
This was the start of the Culture Vulture years - 13-21 especially, when I attacked The Western Tradition with great energy and a retentive memory; limited (it seems) more by constraints of availability than of time.
The house was full of Good Books, there was a small (one medium-sized room) but well-stocked village library, and I was soon going into Bristol to swim among the endless stacks of the City library. I had the good fortune of a well-trained and enthusiastic English teacher from whom I learned to read Middle English and appreciate Shakespearian language - which opened-up 600 years of literature.
(I also borrowed a copy of Sweet's Anglo Saxon primer to try and add another chunk of time to my appreciation - but I could not make head or tail of it. Some people manage to 'teach themselves' languages; I have always been a mediocre linguist.)
Bristol had probably the best professional theatre outside London, and another teacher would take groups in a minibus during the evenings to see pretty much everything they did - so I began to accumulate an experience of plays - old and new.
Classical music took a while to kick-in. For quite a while I was mainly interested in Folk Music, and what little 'Medieval' (including Tudor) music I could hear - but an interest in the Recorder led to Bach and Telemann and then to the vast world of the Baroque and Classical eras (I was not so keen on later stuff, and still am not), and Gilbert and Sullivan led to Grand Opera which I would borrow in boxed LP sets from the City Library - by the time I finished school I had heard pretty much the whole of the pre-20th century standard repertoire, quite a bit of it followed with libretto or score (which could also be borrowed from the library).
All this cultural devouring was done on my own and for my own satisfaction - in some way. I didn't really have anybody to talk with about it - my best friend followed me quite a bit of the way, but he didn't want to analyse things in the way that I did. This led me to the secondary literature - criticism, scholarship, opinion, reviews and the like.
This was where I was, and am, different. Lots of people listen to classical music - but not many (except professionals) read books on the subject, its history, structure, biographies. Lots of people read novels or watch plays, not so many read about novels novels - and read plays and also literary essays - and biographies (plural) or the writers.
Clearly I was seeking more than diversion. Clearly, for me, it was a matter of trying to go inside the arts - and not simply in a practical way (by acting in plays and singing in classical pieces) but in a more philosophical way, indeed in a religious way: to get inside the world view of classical music, literature and so on, and in fact to stay there.
For me, High Culture was a religion. My hope was that my life and abilities would turn-out to be such that - eventually - I would be able to live inside literature and music, and see the world from that place; I would be inside - protected and sustained - and looking-out; and that that world would provide me with the necessities - work and love; money and status and enjoyable activity and human relationships.
There was little of this for the external observer to see - in the sense that this probably looked like a Hobby; recreation from my 'real' work of studying, passing exams and later training as a doctor.
But it wasn't - for me it was the most important thing because it was my hope of happiness, lacking any other religion it was my only hope - it was real life.
Anyway, by good sense or good fortune, I was rescued from this path by Tolkien; who triggered changes that made me step outside of the world of mainstream youth culture and into something altogether larger, more suited to my nature, and more nourishing.
Around half a decade later; I listened to Wagner's opera sequence The Ring.
It was a memorable event, scheduled to come immediately after my medical school examinations but before I got the results. My companions were two music students - and they-block booked one of the sound-proofed studios in the bowels of the music department annexe - and all four volumes of the boxed set of The Ring in the famous 1958-65 version conducted by George Solti and featuring the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.
We therefore listened to these LPs on state-of the-art stereo, following the whole thing on scores, and with intense concentration. In the gaps between sections or operas, we continued to socialize, eat meals together, and discuss the operas; or else were reading books about Wagner.
Altogether it was a rather overwhelming experience, and I was dazedly wandering in a Wagnerian world for the next few months - whether walking in the Lake District, sweeping the corridors and cleaning toilets in a psychiatric hospital (as a summer job), or immersing myself in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
However, I have never done the same again - for the very good reason that the last part of Siegfried and the whole of Gotterdammerung were extremely disappointing to me as the supposed culmination of the cycle - being at a lower level musically, dramatically and spiritually than what preceded.
Indeed, my general feeling is that, qua opera, the first is the best - The Rhinegold; which has a visceral mythic power and unity. Some of the music in Valkyrie and Siegfried is more powerfully moving and appealing - but at a cost of some underlying incoherence. So my practice has been to listen to Rhinegold complete from time to time, but only to chunks of the second and third, and never again to the fourth.
Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Finzi - nice sounds but going nowhere, nothing to say.
I was at a concert the other day which had several pieces of late 19th/ early 20th English music by Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Finzi - and the overall impression was of a musical tradition going nowhere - and (in my judgement) that is exactly where it went since I regard the European tradition of classical music as a closed canon.
The sounds were pleasing, and there were some nice effects. But the structure of the music had become a matter of pattern-making without forward dynamics - the music (at this point in history) had become a matter of small phrases (not melodies) which were passed through the sections of the orchestra, the voices or registers - up and down, through various keys - deftly done but why?
Bernard Shaw memorably said that an artists style was effectiveness of assertion and that was it. And attempting to focus on style in and for itself was trivial- yet this is a particular danger for music because it is hard of impossible to say in words what is being asserted - what is the meaning of music.
Yet the meaningfulness of music is vital to its artistic status. Of course it is good to have music that is pleasant, or exciting, of evokes a mood - but it is not enough to constitute an artistic tradition. Properly (in my opinion!) the canon of an art goes between the meaningful artists - those whose mastery is of meaning not style.
The reason Beethoven is so much greater than Brahms is not so much a matter of technical pioneering but that Beethoven had - perhaps above all others except Bach and Mozart - a great soul, so much to 'say' in his music, so much struggling for expression and being expressed.Whereas Brahms simply did not, and his music cannot escape from a core flaccidity.
From this perspective I would rank (for example) Michael Tippet far above Benjamin Britten because (in his early works, only) Tippet was saying something - whereas Britten had nothing to say - or at least nothing interesting. Britten was simply a shallow man of great musical ability. Tippet was a throwback to the late 19th century.
This effectiveness of assertion is ultimately what gives music its forward impulsion. Lacking which a certain stagnant quality cannot be concealed. This differentiates - say - Richard Strauss from Mahler. For all his great qualities Mahler is stagnant, torpid; for all his vulgarities, Strauss was dynamic, energizing. And all who came after Strauss have either been less great musicians, or else tended towards stasis.
Indeed, I would regard the two supposed geniuses of twentieth century music - Schoenberg and Stravinsky - as knowing perfectly well that they had nothing to say, and knowing perfectly well their inability to escape the centripetal pull of stasis - but faking-it, disguising the fact, by explicit experimentalism.
This matter of 'having something to say' is the most subtle and in that sense subjective matter of judgement. And hearing a poor piece by a great composer can be deceptive - in most of what he wrote, Mozart had nothing to say, but was just making patterns of sound on autopilot - and the same applies to pretty much everybody.
One can only judge artists by their best work - and greatness of artistic status requires several great works or at least one very big great work (big to prove that it wasn't just a lucky fluke).
And, at the bottom line, if I personally cannot perceive the artist has something to say, then I cannot, will not, and should not grant them greatness - this is not something that generally ought to be taken on trust from other people.
Especially since most musicians are so shallow! - and this equally applies to critics and scholars. But what applies to music also applies to poetry, drama, novels... all arts.
And it is to be able and adept to perceive and to evaluate meaning of expression for oneself, that one explores and learns an artistic tradition.
The sounds were pleasing, and there were some nice effects. But the structure of the music had become a matter of pattern-making without forward dynamics - the music (at this point in history) had become a matter of small phrases (not melodies) which were passed through the sections of the orchestra, the voices or registers - up and down, through various keys - deftly done but why?
Bernard Shaw memorably said that an artists style was effectiveness of assertion and that was it. And attempting to focus on style in and for itself was trivial- yet this is a particular danger for music because it is hard of impossible to say in words what is being asserted - what is the meaning of music.
Yet the meaningfulness of music is vital to its artistic status. Of course it is good to have music that is pleasant, or exciting, of evokes a mood - but it is not enough to constitute an artistic tradition. Properly (in my opinion!) the canon of an art goes between the meaningful artists - those whose mastery is of meaning not style.
The reason Beethoven is so much greater than Brahms is not so much a matter of technical pioneering but that Beethoven had - perhaps above all others except Bach and Mozart - a great soul, so much to 'say' in his music, so much struggling for expression and being expressed.Whereas Brahms simply did not, and his music cannot escape from a core flaccidity.
From this perspective I would rank (for example) Michael Tippet far above Benjamin Britten because (in his early works, only) Tippet was saying something - whereas Britten had nothing to say - or at least nothing interesting. Britten was simply a shallow man of great musical ability. Tippet was a throwback to the late 19th century.
This effectiveness of assertion is ultimately what gives music its forward impulsion. Lacking which a certain stagnant quality cannot be concealed. This differentiates - say - Richard Strauss from Mahler. For all his great qualities Mahler is stagnant, torpid; for all his vulgarities, Strauss was dynamic, energizing. And all who came after Strauss have either been less great musicians, or else tended towards stasis.
Indeed, I would regard the two supposed geniuses of twentieth century music - Schoenberg and Stravinsky - as knowing perfectly well that they had nothing to say, and knowing perfectly well their inability to escape the centripetal pull of stasis - but faking-it, disguising the fact, by explicit experimentalism.
This matter of 'having something to say' is the most subtle and in that sense subjective matter of judgement. And hearing a poor piece by a great composer can be deceptive - in most of what he wrote, Mozart had nothing to say, but was just making patterns of sound on autopilot - and the same applies to pretty much everybody.
One can only judge artists by their best work - and greatness of artistic status requires several great works or at least one very big great work (big to prove that it wasn't just a lucky fluke).
And, at the bottom line, if I personally cannot perceive the artist has something to say, then I cannot, will not, and should not grant them greatness - this is not something that generally ought to be taken on trust from other people.
Especially since most musicians are so shallow! - and this equally applies to critics and scholars. But what applies to music also applies to poetry, drama, novels... all arts.
And it is to be able and adept to perceive and to evaluate meaning of expression for oneself, that one explores and learns an artistic tradition.
Review of Switched-on Brandenburgs - JS Bach's Brandenburg Concerti done on synthesizer by Walter Carlos (aka Wendy Carlos)
Considered strictly in terms of musicality, this album contains some of the best performances of Bach's Brandenburgs I have ever heard (and I have heard a lot of them!).
Of course, some will not be able to tolerate - let alone enjoy - synthesizer performances; but the detailed musicality, fluency and detail of these performances is wonderful.
Created from 1973-1980 in the very early days of synthesizers, these were pretty-much note-by-note constructions - which explains the loving detail - but the shapeliness and fluidity of the phrasing and dynamics is impossible to explain - just a marvel.
Brandenburg One is the best all round performance of this concerto I know of - and the only fully satisfying one; the special delight of Two is the continuo baseline - which is beautifully and lucidly articulated; Three is great all-round - with a particularly fine 'improvised' second movement; Four is good; the First Movement of Five is top notch - with the cycle of fifths especially satisfying; and the first movement of Six is almost the best thing of all: really exciting (with some extra bubbling ascending sound-effect scales adding pep and verve).
Don't take my word for it: these realizations were endorsed by no less a Bach-ian than Glenn Gould. Probably they are a one-off - a never-to-be-repeated confluence of now primitive but then cutting-edge technology; and the one and only person capable of using it to create - not merely a gimmick - but real music of permanent value.
Of course, some will not be able to tolerate - let alone enjoy - synthesizer performances; but the detailed musicality, fluency and detail of these performances is wonderful.
Created from 1973-1980 in the very early days of synthesizers, these were pretty-much note-by-note constructions - which explains the loving detail - but the shapeliness and fluidity of the phrasing and dynamics is impossible to explain - just a marvel.
Brandenburg One is the best all round performance of this concerto I know of - and the only fully satisfying one; the special delight of Two is the continuo baseline - which is beautifully and lucidly articulated; Three is great all-round - with a particularly fine 'improvised' second movement; Four is good; the First Movement of Five is top notch - with the cycle of fifths especially satisfying; and the first movement of Six is almost the best thing of all: really exciting (with some extra bubbling ascending sound-effect scales adding pep and verve).
Don't take my word for it: these realizations were endorsed by no less a Bach-ian than Glenn Gould. Probably they are a one-off - a never-to-be-repeated confluence of now primitive but then cutting-edge technology; and the one and only person capable of using it to create - not merely a gimmick - but real music of permanent value.
Thursday, April 30, 2026
Which is the best Bass instrument?
Double Bass
It has great, unmatched, flexibility - from the classical Orchestra to Jazz - it can be bowed or plucked - and has the ability to blend smoothly with other instruments while providing the bedrock of the overall sound. But this blending also means that it cannot articulate clearly - the sound is too fuzzy for that. Hopeless for solo work.
Bassoon
Great articulation - and when a bassoon is added to the double bass section the combination is able to reveal the 'corners' in (for example) the basso continuo part of baroque era music. Also makes a very good solo instrument, with a wide range of tonalities. But, on its own, the sound lacks the fullness of the double bass; and the good articulation comes at the price of rather poor blending ability. Also, the bassoon is intrinsically funny - somehow it cannot do tragedy.
Tuba
A strong, round, loud sound - and has the ability to do both smooth legato and to bounce-along as support for marching music and the like. Blends seamlessly with other brass instruments. But draws too much attention to itself when playing with strings and woodwinds - and in small groups tends to make the music sound samey.
Bass Guitar
Not much use for anything 'classical' outside of the pop/ jazz/ folk realm but marvellous and essential in that realm - great for rhythm, and has unexploited potential for supporting church and communal singing.
Bass Saxophone
Big, fat, powerful, well-articulated sound - but even more dominating than a tuba; and I must admit it is really a novelty instrument! When the bass sax is going, its hard to listen to anything else - but it can do terrific jazz solos!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxP0cf1bpTM
The bass saxophone contrasted with the double bass shows that there is no best bass instrument overall - if you can do blending and sweetness, then you can't do articulation or make a good solo instrument; because a strength is also a weakness.
It's a case of horses for courses.
It has great, unmatched, flexibility - from the classical Orchestra to Jazz - it can be bowed or plucked - and has the ability to blend smoothly with other instruments while providing the bedrock of the overall sound. But this blending also means that it cannot articulate clearly - the sound is too fuzzy for that. Hopeless for solo work.
Bassoon
Great articulation - and when a bassoon is added to the double bass section the combination is able to reveal the 'corners' in (for example) the basso continuo part of baroque era music. Also makes a very good solo instrument, with a wide range of tonalities. But, on its own, the sound lacks the fullness of the double bass; and the good articulation comes at the price of rather poor blending ability. Also, the bassoon is intrinsically funny - somehow it cannot do tragedy.
Tuba
A strong, round, loud sound - and has the ability to do both smooth legato and to bounce-along as support for marching music and the like. Blends seamlessly with other brass instruments. But draws too much attention to itself when playing with strings and woodwinds - and in small groups tends to make the music sound samey.
Bass Guitar
Not much use for anything 'classical' outside of the pop/ jazz/ folk realm but marvellous and essential in that realm - great for rhythm, and has unexploited potential for supporting church and communal singing.
Bass Saxophone
Big, fat, powerful, well-articulated sound - but even more dominating than a tuba; and I must admit it is really a novelty instrument! When the bass sax is going, its hard to listen to anything else - but it can do terrific jazz solos!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxP0cf1bpTM
The bass saxophone contrasted with the double bass shows that there is no best bass instrument overall - if you can do blending and sweetness, then you can't do articulation or make a good solo instrument; because a strength is also a weakness.
It's a case of horses for courses.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
-
My first musical instrument, at age ten, was a ukelele - the one that looks like a little guitar - and it cost one pound and one shilling; ...
-
Double Bass It has great, unmatched, flexibility - from the classical Orchestra to Jazz - it can be bowed or plucked - and has the ability...
-
We live in a world of professional performers - singers, musicians, actors, dancers; and it seems natural to us that these be mostly profess...