Going to Cheltenham Jazz Festival had some unexpected benefits – one of them being a cheap CD of Frankie Laine’s Greatest Hits.
The sound of ‘The Kid’s Last Fight’ took me right back to Sunday mornings in the kitchen, mum peeling potatoes at the sink overlooking the garden while joining in with the chorus while through the open back door, Dad could be heard whistling along from the workshop end of the garage.
A chunk of happy carefree childhood, right there, back in the room with me.
Our house was rarely without music. It was almost all popular music Frankie, Doris Day, Jo Stafford, Frank Ifield, Cliff Richard, Elvis, Andy Williams with show tunes thrown in the mix – Mario Lanza singing the Drinking Song from the Student Prince.
It was only my father who had a some of the classics. I caught his affection for the drama of Wagner’s Tannhauser Overture, the galloping excitement of Rossini’s William Tell and the wonderful oceanic swells of Fingal’s Cave by Mendelssohn.
Reading extracts recently from a speech by the artist Grayson Perry made me realise that perhaps, growing up in a working class household, I was lucky to have heard any classical music at all.
Grayson says that he didn’t have any classical music in his working class childhood home and has always felt it wasn’t for the likes of his family. He still feels, he claims, that he is pretending.
How could that be? Is that really the way it was in the early sixties and before? Was there really a divide between the ‘thick’ poor and the ‘cultured’ better off?
I heard less of it as I was growing up purely because Dad wasn’t as interested in music generally as my mother, so his records got played less. There was never any suggestion that it wasn’t “for the likes of us,” but neither was there any attempt to broaden my musical education.
That came via school music lessons – a marvellous music teacher who brought his favourites in and just let us listen – which seemed a tremendous privilege, at the time. Playing the piano and flute helped broaden the classical music experience too and lo, it came to pass that I became aware of the existence of that peculiar thing, Radio 3 and then Classic FM.
The other thing that struck me about Grayson Perry was the way he says when he listens to music, what affects him is not just the melody or the interpretation but the thought of all the hours of practice; he’s in awe of the rigour and dedication.
Curious. For me, music is not so much a listening process as an altering process. The sounds change how I am, conjure images, makes me feel different. I absolutely never even consider the mechanics of the musicians and the backstories of practice. If I’m listening to a Bach fugue, I don’t find myself thinking “God his fingers must have been sore hitting all those keys for hours on end!”
I don’t have that thing of the music of my youth still being my favourite. Memories flood back when I listen but it doesn’t make them better than some of the music I’ve heard since. Similarly, The Planets was the first classical record I bought for myself and it’s still up there in my top ten but it’s been usurped in my affections by other work that moves me far more profoundly.
It made me wonder what other people’s experiences of classical music are?
What age you were when you were first aware of classical music? Do you still have particular pieces that have been favourites from way back when?
Boadicea's Chariot 
My introduction to classical music was at school. The maths cum music teacher (who later went off to be a conductor) involved the whole school in a production of the Messiah. I must have been nine or ten… it was an incredible experience to be part of it. The Hallelujah Chorus was the first record I ever bought.
Could you put that record on the site, please? I have been trying to find it for several months. I first heard it while in England, on holiday in 1954/5. I was staying in Henley while on holiday from Kenya.
yeah, we did bits of the Messiah too. what i liked was we had two music teachers who were rivals so one handled the choir, the other did the orchestra and we practised separately. it was only a couple of days before the concert that we got together for our first joint and i realised there was going to be singing.
Also, whenever the violins would say “give me a C’ for tuneup, i would give them B flat. i loved the resulting conflict
CB – we did the whole thing, from start to finish!
janh1, strange how evocative music is ….”took me right back to Sunday mornings in the kitchen.” My sister was in love with Elvis and South Pacific.
But my classical tastes, like yours were awakened by school music. Delius still lingers hauntingly…………
Check this out Zen. Over 4 million views:-
Brilliant, toc.
I grew up in a household that valued peace and quiet above all else. There was no music of any kind. all my homes have been the same, silence is golden! I like to think and I can’t do that with clattering music.
I have to admit I have never bought a record in my life!
I have never played a single you tube clip as posted here, not interested.
I do not object to music but I prefer to go to a concert and hear it live and give it my full attention which I do quite frequently. I have one golden rule, with the exception of Elgar, if the programme was conceived after 1900 I don’t bother.
I have never been to a pop concert in my life except the ones at Uni where they were playing at dances.
Spousal unit uses headphones unless I am up the greenhouse. He more than makes up for me, he has hundreds of records of operas.
I don’t know if it is a class thing, I lived as a child in such isolation, there were no other kids to visit in the area, but I don’t remember rural homes being filled with noise except barking dogs!
My favourite music is chamber music, I like to hear the individual musical strands. I don’t care for the massed choir thing. I once heard the Messiah played and sung by group equivalent to the Academy of Ancient Music, two dozen singers and about a dozen musicians with viols and serpents so to speak, as it would have been produced when written. I think it was the best I have ever heard, I find all those people belting it out rather coarse in these mass productions, heard one like it in Brum about 3 years ago, grim to my mind.
Each to his own, Christina. When we eventually got a gramophone, we were limited to Elgar and Rossini for a while. Then came Finlandia and The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba. I have always loved them.
I began listening to classical music because of my older brother who was some 8 years older. He was the contemplative type and liked classical music. Neither of my parents did particularly. My father liked musicals and my mother liked all those pop male singers of the crooner age, like Tony Bennett. But the big influence was my younger brother, who at a very early age wanted to take up the horn. He was encouraged by friends of my parents who ran a small cabaret theater that did miniature productions of Gilbert and Sullivan. The husband a pianist, the wife a classically trained soprano. So my brother got his French horn, and he was a good musician. A little native talent there. My grandfather had taught himself to play the violin and had a small band that used to play at picnics in the park in Oakland. Brother’s high school life was filled with enthusiasms for classical music and opera. I remember my mother demanding that we turn off Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps. “It’s so discordant!” she would yell. “It’s dissonant,” we would mutter back. She couldn’t tell the difference, but we didn’t realize that at the time! No one minded though as I committed excerpts of the Mikado, HMS Pinafore and Pirates of Penzance to memory. Just ask me to sing “Tit Willow.”
janh1, are you aware that your post has been copied and pasted on MyT by Shlobod?
Janh1; I’ve just seen this on MyT; I commented there, not realised it had been nicked…
Well, to sum up what I was saying there, classical music has pretty much underpinned my life. I was raised on it but didn’t really start to love it until I saw a live orchestra do Berlioz.
THere are so many pieces that I love I wouldn’t know where to start. Tchaikovsky was an early fave – I loved the brilliance of the 5th as a teenager; didn’t get the 6th, the Pathetique as it’s known, until I was much older. It’s bleaker, darker; it ends by sinking into itself like an abyss…and is thought by many to this day to be Tchaikovsky’s suicide note to the world…
Then there’s Mendelssohn – seriously underrated in my view – Debussy, early stuff like Tallis and Lassus. Beethoven’s 5th, although I can’t have him too often because he does strange things to me!
EM Forster once said that great novels were like great music, because in the spine tingling moments afterwards, you hear the music that has never been played…
I can’t resist commenting on a good post like this, even though I said I was supposed to be not blogging here again. Sorry; inconstancy – my middle name 😉
Here is that Tchaikovsky. The weird bit’s at the end…
Sheona:
I noticed that too.
We always had music in our house too. When I was very young I remember we had a wind up gramophone, but a very upmarket one, i.e. it had volume control in the form of a pair of doors that you close over the horn to reduce the volume!
I really started to appreciate classical music when I was at grammar school. For some reason we did not understand, we had to sing a few bars in front of the music teacher in the first week we were there. Some cottoned on and sang out of tune or claimed their voice was breaking, but unfortunately I was one of the first, and I had a decent soprano voice then, so I was immediately “volunteered” for the school choir. (It was an all boys school, so there were no girls to sing the high bits). However once we started, we learned several pieces from the Messiah and other oratorios. I really liked this sound and have been a great fan of Baroque music ever since.
However, at the same time, rock and roll had just begun to hit the airwaves, so I also gathered a big liking for that as well. I had a reasonable talent with both the piano and guitar, but eventually ended up with an electric guitar, playing in a band, rather going for classical music. Got more girls that way, you see 🙂
Wow, Boadicea, that ambitious of that teacher to involve primary school age kids in such a project.
Unforgettable! My youngest was in a primary school choir led by a similar teacher and they won several competitions – but they didn’t sing anything as complex as the Messiah!!
So, CB you gave them a Bflat with your voice or your instrument?
Yes, powerfully evocative, Janus. Heard my first Delius at a concert in Gloucester Cathedral – On Hearing the First Cuckoo of Spring. The nice thing about a Cathedral city is hearing music escaping from open doors and just wandering into a rehearsal for something like the Three Choirs Festival. Discovered Zadoc the Priest like that. Massed choirs, morning rehearsal. Goose-bump city!
Fascinated by your love of silence, Christina. I’ve been on holiday with friends who had no music at all. It was ok, and although you carry it in your head, it never occurred to me how much I’d miss it. Horses for courses. I love Elgar too..well..and Vaughan Williams. The thought of the Messiah performed with original instruments appeals hugely.
You had a gramophone, Zen? My parents had a radiogram with a turn-table under the lid and knobs where you adjusted the radio frequency. It was a nice piece of furniture with curves; made of highly polished wood with a lovely grain. For years, I wasn’t even allowed to touch it let alone put a record on. My dad was confident that I’d ruin the needle 🙂
Jan – that school took pupils from 4 through to 18, there were about 600 of us, so it wasn’t quite as ambitious as it might seem.
My father was the only one who really liked music – and we had all the Bing Crosby, and other stuff. He was not impressed with Rock – but it didn’t matter because I managed to persuade my mother to let me have the radiogram in my bedroom…
Like Christina, I now love silence – I play the clips here, but I can’t bear background noise. I walk out of shops where the music is deafeningly loud. I went to the hairdresser yesterday, they normally have the music fairly low and unobtrusive. Not yesterday – after about 30 seconds I said (I think politely!) that I would be leaving if they didn’t turn it down…
Thanks for that Jaime. Wonderful stuff. I might have liked a crack at the French horn and I always liked the sound of the cor anglais. Played the flute and was briefly in a band before I had the kids but I didn’t enjoy getting drowned out by other wind instruments or the kind of music we played.
Sheona, thanks for the heads up. No I didn’t know that. Bloody nerve! 🙂
Hi Claire and thanks – totally agreed re Tchaikovsky – there’s a desperation to it. Don’t know why you can’t blog here – I LIKE you bloggin here. Woss wrong with you, girl?
Such a good quote from E M Forster. Yes. Although some classical pieces including symphonies, are most definitely musical expressions of love-making…which I venture to suggest might be why you can’t over=do the Beethoven? 🙂
Funnily enough just got Tallis Spem in Allium a few months back. Extraordinarily complex and beautiful.
You must have pulled big-time FEG in that band! Being in a choir just doesn’t compete. My youngest was in a band for a couple of years and I saw with my own eyes the effect that his raised status (bass player!) had on girls, the little hussies!
That does sound a vair posh wind-up gramophone, with doors and everything. My nan had one but sadly got rid of it as “old-fashioned” before I was born when her electronics whizz son built her a record-player.
Oh right Boadicea – I thought, hell, that’s good for primary school kids!!! 😀
No I don’t like imposed background noise either – or a lot of other people’s music for that matter. I’m quite picky.
It’s funny, sometimes when I’m writing, music is too distracting and at other times, it’s a positive inspiration and conjures up a useful scene. Depends, I suppose.
It is interesting Jan, that most of our parents were useless, in their own way. Most of us, and I include myself, had to go to school to learn to appreciate music.
My family were a DIY sort; they played music, on every occasion, but probably, on reflection, quite badly. We have unfortunately continued this tradition, and we all either sing, play the triangle, keyboard or whatever, but we do enjoy it. Ghastly confession but despite this, we do get on quite well with our neighbours.
Yes I noticed that too, except I’d say I’ve somehow inherited my mother’s wholehearted uninhibited love of music. There was no attempt to broaden my horizons. My nan was the most musical of them all – effortless piano player who did talk about and play the classics – and patiently taught me to play some – but whose records consisted mostly of Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers!
Ara; back on Normal Side!
Janh: what did you think of the Tallis? I find it unbelievably haunting; like voices streaming down the ages…
It was and still is the largest scale choral work of its day, and is unusual because there are forty separate vocal parts, split between eight choirs, which weave in and out of each other constantly. If you separate the choirs, you get some idea of surround sound, sixteenth century style.
And it’s because of composers like Tallis and Byrd that some historians argue that the Renaissance, in musical terms, was split between Italy and England.
I’ll shut up now! 🙂
Good taste your grandmother, Jan!
Claire, quite frankly it takes me straight back to the cloisters or Prinknash Abbey. Tremendously complex and sophisticated yet calming. Of another time, definitely. I wonder if it ever has been performed in “surround sound” where the audience is at the centre – ie the Albert Hall? That would be something.
It would…St Mark’s in Venice was the place where many of the large scale motets and masses were aired. There were stalls/galleries for choirs on either side at the front, and the sound of voices weaving in and out was supposed to evoke heaven and divinity etc etc.
I imagined this orgasmic scene of people going into raptures over the polyphony streaming out of the galleries, but needless to say, when I actually went, a couple of years ago, I was badly disappointed. Couldn’t see a damn thing because of all the sweaty crowds and anoraks.
The other big thing of the English renaissance in music was the madrigals. They were sort of naughty though, comparatively speaking…
I know St Marks too. I went five years ago but sadly no singing. There was a queue of people about a mile long waiting to file past some dead guy. No idea who he was. Very pale though, encased in glass. I liked the fact that the Venetians nicked the body of St Mark from Constantinople by packing it under pork to get past the muslim guards.
They also nicked those fabulous horse sculptures from the Hippodrome at Constantinople. Well worth the trip. 🙂
Madrigals? Sort of naughty? What sort of naughty precisely? Ooops. Getting late. Tomorrow, then.
‘Classical music’ was superior in my parents eyes, to anything else. ‘Our’ music was scoffed at, it was an unpleasant situation to try and watch T of the Ps in our house and quite a revelation to visit a friends house and watch T of the P’s en famille- with no-one scoffing, everyone having a good time.
So I grew up thinking classical music was a great social decider. But it’s not.
I can’t sing at all and that is a great hole in my life. I’d love to be able to. So being unable to sing or retain a tune makes me miss out on all those things that you can so obviously can enjoy in music, Jan.
I enjoy music but not as ‘background noise’- I’d rather listen to R 4
Ah well Jan, that would be telling. But they are; naughty. Don’t believe the fa la la and the merry lambs a playing stuff. It’s all lads and lasses rollin int hay.
Sort of like a musical, sixteenth century version of the saucy postcard.
Here is most famous one by Thomas Morely. Quite a good interpretation,even though conductor is rather demented looking…
Pseu
My father was extremely scathing about ‘my’ music. He made the mistake of complaining about the words in front of Bearsy one time… who stood and looked at him thoughtfully and said:
That was the end of that conversation – for ever!
I, also, enjoy R4 – which we can get here.
Interesting Pseu. I grew up watching everything from Juke Box Jury to TOTP because of my mother’s interest, which is quite the reverse of your experience. So my father’s occasional playing of the classics was a different world – and welcome for it, actually.
No, music shouldn’t be a social divider but I still feel it is when it comes to Covent Garden opera and Glyndebourne – simply on cost grounds. Classic FM – though it gets on my nerves because of the ads and the other “soft” stuff that creeps in – has done more than anything else to make classics accessible.
Thanks Claire. Actually that guy is hilarious if you turn off the sound.
Jan, we originally had a grammophone, powered by a car battery. The radiogramme, a lovely Grundig hi-fi came years later after electricity had arrived. As with your’s it was my father’s pride and joy.
A car battery-powered gramophone? Must have been nice for picnics – park the car up and put a record on? 😉 A bit of a heave to get a car battery into the living room, surely?
Ah sweet to think those radiogrammes were our dads’ first state-of-the-art pieces of technology.
Got any 75’s still hanging around, Zen? I have a stack but sadly the record player with the correct speed is hidden under several tons of books.
Mornin’ Jânh – There was always classical music in my parents’ house when I was growing up and, even though my own tastes veered towards Gentle Giant, Genesis, Yes and Pink Floyd during the late sixties and early seventies, the masters remain a big part of my life.
By the way, I saw your comment the other day about seeing some views froom around The Cave and am working on this.
Tocino – The silent monks clip is a classic in itself.
OZ
Morning! 🙂 I rather hoped you were working on it, OZ. I’ve only got some predictable shots of the Algarve and Sagres. But I’ll post mine if you post yours.
Jan, it was an extra! It had to go away weekly to be charged up! All my 78s are long gone – a nomadic way of is not conducive to their longivity! I do remember my first one ever, Mad Dogs and Englishmen by Noel Coward – there’s a blast from the past!
way of life, sorry.
Morning Jan
Fantastic blog and very interesting to read about everybody’s musical tastes.
I was a folky in my youth. Attended Perth Folk Club twice a week and quite a few folk festivals. Saw some great acts, including the Incredible String Band, Dave & Toni Arthur, Dave Swarbrick, Hamish Imlach, Alex Campbell, Martin Carthy and many others including the Humblebums, Gerry Rafferty and Billy Connolly. One day, I might tell you about the time I was rude to Billy Connolly in a toilet in the Salutation Hotel in Perth in 1966.
In pop music, I only ever really liked the Kinks and Manfred Mann and most of the rest of 60’s pop sailed right by me.
All changed when I came to Embra Uni and met Mrs M. Granddaughter of an orchestral musician. The whole family was deeply steeped in classical music and had been for generations.
So, I went with the flow. Struggled at first but my epiphany was at the Usher Hall. She had joined the Embra Festival Chorus and I went along to see her. Only fair. She had gone to a St Johnstone v Partick Thistle game with me the week before. 7-0 to the Saints.
It was the Verdi Requiem. Totally mind-blowing, particularly Dies Irae. I went straight home and swapped my entire collection of Clancy Brother LP’s for my sister’s copies of said Requiem and of the Planet Suite.
Been hooked on classical music ever since and it’s been a great journey.
The Embra Festival did the Requiem again in 1982 with Abbado, Jessye Norman, Margaret Price, Jose Carreras and Ruggero Raimondi. Superb performance which got rave reviews. Sorry the sound quality of the clip is not great but you do get a few shots of Mrs M. in her prime (not that she isn’t still in her prime, of course).
Love it Zen – the radiogram battery!
Afternoon John. Quite jolly jealous of the Gerry Rafferty, live. I love that album. Yes I loved the Kinks too and Mike d’Abo, Paul Jones’ successor lives locally and used to present on local radio.
Wow. I found the Requiem rather late in life. Heard Mozart’s first. I can imagine the effect of hearing the Requiem for the first time performed live. Spine-tingling!!
Marvellous clip. I couldn’t pick out Mrs M. A good friend is in a highly respected choir (not on a par with Mrs M’s though) and says this is immensely challenging to get absolutely right but fabulous.
I wonder whether Mrs M has similar memories inspirational memories of the St Johnstone v Partick Thistle game? 😉
Jan, in those days, no electricity!