Schooldays

I suppose we all have our heroes and ogres amongst our former teachers. My own school (Charterhouse) had two music teachers, and both were former Cambridge organ scholars who had become organists of London parish churchs. Both gave regular recitals (which we were supposed to attend) of Reger and Karg-Elert (who apparently were major composers). One of these buggers also regularly directed either the St John Passion or the St Matthew Passion (in alternating years) and once again, attendance was compulsory (I was even cajoled into taking money at the door, my first involvement in Concert Mismanagement). (One small detail – they hated each other and refused to speak to each other). From them I learnt many useful and valuable things:

Sir Edward Elgar was Britain’s greatest composer
The finest work of the 20th century is A Child of our Time
Shostakovich was a talentless author of pinko cacophony
John Cage will soon be locked up and sent to the electric chair
If you listen to Wagner your penis will shrivel up and you will go blind
All music written before Bach was written in modes, because the composers were incompetent
Percussion, with the exception of timpani, is not a genuine group of musical instruments
If no organ is available, an orchestra may be used as a substitute for it
John Rutter is the greatest living composer
Saint David Willcocks is a finer conductor than any of those Krauts or Wops
Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast is one of the finest compositions known to man

That’s what I learned in school. So it must be right.

I remember being told that the Tudor church music tradition was musically “more important” than the Viennese classical tradition; that Britten and Tippett’s personal lives (and both were still alive at the time) were unbecoming to those aspiring to the hallowed rank of composer (and part of the reason why they never wrote anything to match Tallis, or Byrd, or even Weelkes, for God’s sake); and that the highest musical ambition to which a boy could aspire was a Cambridge choral or organ scholarship.

But the greatest bugbear of all was opera. Not proper music at all. I well remember that in the Fourth, boys were expected to write a project on a composer – influenced by the fine things I heard at home, as I began to rifle through my father’s extensive record collection, I chose to do mine on Verdi. I was taken aside and told that Verdi wasn’t really a proper composer at all, a purveyor of sensationalist trash to the nineteenth century Italian masses, not worthy of serious study, and I should reconsider if I wanted to get a decent grade.

Tags: bach, britten, elgar, john cage, rutter, school, shostakovich, tippett, verdi, wagner