by Tot Taylor
With his father to guide him, the young schoolboy had studied the orchestral score to Gustav Holst’s The Planets at home late into the evening when he should have been concentrating on his history and geography homework. While Frieda waited closeby with her jigsaw puzzle, tut-tutting and questioning her husband about these unnecessary, time-consuming tuitions, John Snr would patiently go through each movement, each planet, one at a time, lining up the LP – the first recorded version, by Sir Adrian Boult – so that the two Nightlys could physically hear the dots they were staring at. The thunderous majesty of ‘Mars’ – John identified its sequential build as the ascending chords to ‘Tonight’ from West Side Story1 – or the delicate floating woodwinds of ‘Mercury’ and ‘Venus’ would fill the room, entrancing and at times almost swallowing its inhabitants.
The young student would ask his father how these magical sounds were produced, so John Snr would pick out the inner harmonic parts – glockenspiel, flute and oboe – on the piano for him; in turn John, after seeing where his father’s hands lay on the keyboard, would then slowly play back each solo line. But the boy never did learn to read or compose on paper himself.
The sheer beauty of Holst’s masterwork, that of a Hammersmith schoolmaster, written at weekends in the composer’s spare time away from the constant round of teaching, a piece more concerned with spirituality and theosophy rather than the assumed astronomy, affected the teenager deeply on both a musical and a philosophical level, having an almost overbearing influence on his own early work, which he jokingly described as being ‘Stravinsky-ish, Tchaikovsky-esque… Holst-like!’ Each time he played a figure on the chime-bars or a tremolando on the vibes, he’d announce to Justin, ‘It’s like in The Planets, the beginning of “Venus”, the bit before the big chords… Look! It’s that sound!”
Holst’s grand suite was also influential in terms of format. Instead of following the usual theme and variation structure, The Planets were presented by their composer as ‘globules’ of music, with no repeat of thematic material from ‘Mars’ to ‘Neptune’. The piece consisted of seven self-contained spheres of sound, the first real space music; an immense achievement for a part-time composer-teacher. It became one of John’s ambitions to someday attempt a project of this magnitude. Even when he was working at KCEMS he fantasised about such a creation, a fully symphonic work – a real Opus. The inside covers of his schoolbooks contained endless lists of possible titles. He imagined the orchestra being conducted by Holst’s daughter Imogen, who at that time still lived and taught with Britten at Aldeburgh. And as his father always explained to his young son, ‘You don’t need to write a lot of music, John… you just need that one really big thing. That one great thing. The thing you’ll be remembered for. If you’re lucky, it’ll be a proper masterpiece… something that beats all of the competition, even Bach and Beethoven… Like ‘Stranger in Paradise’2, ‘White Christmas’3… or The Planets4. Just that one big one, John. That’s all.’ What a pity the boy didn’t listen to him.
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* Revolver (Parlophone PMC 7009) originally Abracadabra
1 The melodic ascent also forms the basis of Andy Williams’ Almost There (Keller/Shayne) (CBS 201803).
2 Adapted from Alexander Borodin’s opera Prince Igor, ‘Stranger in Paradise’ - a Number 1 hit in the UK for Tony Bennett, and John Nightly Snr’s favourite song, was remade by song-writers Robert Wright and George Forrest. The opera, incomplete and unperformed after 28 years’ work during the life of the composer, was assembled and completed following Borodin’s sudden death by Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin’s flatmate Alexander Glazunov, who knew the work intimately having heard his friend play it so often on the piano. The central aria, ‘The Gliding Dance of the Maidens’ from the Polovtsian Dances, became the evergreen hit ‘Stranger in Paradise‘ (from the musical Kismet).
A solar eclipse features as a motif in Prince Igor. At the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, February 2014, music from the opera was played while an eclipsed sun, crescent-shaped, drifted across the upper levels of the centre of the stadium, illustrating the importance of Russian history in the Prince Igor story.
‘The episodes of the solar eclipse, of the parting from Yaroslavna, divide it into halves which fringe the entire prologue’ Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Chronicle of My Musical Life (1909)
3 Frieda’s favourite song – written in California in the heat of the summer.
4 The Planets’ original title was Seven Large Pieces for Orchestra. Theosophy, pioneered by Helena Blavatsky and with roots in Eastern philosophy, was popular in the early 20th century, influencing Holst’s operatic works Sita (1899) and Savitri (1916) as well as his Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda (1908).
John Gower (1330 - 1408) 'Vox Clamatis' ink on vellum © Glasgow University Library
Shall I tell you about my life?
They say I’m a man of the world
Peter Green (b.1946)
1 – 2 – 3 – 4 !
In the Nightly household Frieda ruled the roost, though it was John’s father who had nurtured what both of his parents recognised, in the phrase of Dr Jani Feather, the boy’s music teacher, as an ‘ungodly ability’ for music. While John Snr thought it important that his son learn to read and write the dots, believing that he had it in him to become a professional musician of the first rank, Frieda rejected this out of hand, convinced that the act of committing music to paper via an academic study of harmony and counterpoint would interrupt and disturb the flow that would naturally come down to John from… ‘wherever it came down from’. As far as John’s mother was concerned there existed a kind of magic seal between inspiration and execution – the arrival of inspiration into the mind of the creator and the execution or ‘re-playing’ of it by him. Her argument being that too much study and knowledge, particularly dot-writing, might destroy this pure gold due to valuable ‘receiving time’ being wasted in transcription.
Frieda pictured her son poring over an orchestral manuscript, weighed down by his own facility, cantankerous and choleric, shock-haired, literally tearing his hair out, in the image of the great composers, as he feverishly attempted to commit gold dust to paper, as she imagined Mozart and Beethoven had done, while at the same time the actual logging of material blocked the channels of creation as a stream of top-quality content tried to force its way through. Her oft-quoted example was Irving Berlin, the writer of all of her favourite songs, from ‘White Christmas’ to ‘Cheek to Cheek’. Berlin, untutored and untrained, but talented and tortured in equal amounts, both composer and lyricist, was a songwriter without peer as well as a canny operator and publisher of his own priceless catalogue. Lauded by even Gershwin and Cole Porter as ‘the best’, he never did learn to read a note. When John Snr pointed out that the reading and writing of music was crucial for their son so that he could at least remember what he had come up with and therefore be able to play it back, Frieda would just reply: ‘But you can record it on one of your machines. At last there’s a good reason for them to be sitting in the garage all this time, and his music can stay in his head.’
And, though John’s father argued that understanding the transpositions, ranges and timbres, along with the individual characteristics of each instrument – in other words, a study of basic orchestration – would be of immense benefit to their son, Frieda would not hear of it, insisting that things must be kept ‘pure’ at all costs, and that (because she believed the boy could easily achieve anything he aspired to anyway) there was really no need for any kind of study or analysis of the subject whatsoever.
In the summer of 1952, the new Nightly family spent their holidays with Frieda’s brothers, Sindre and Steinar, at their home in Trondheim on the west coast of Norway. Here, for the very first time, the painfully shy four-year-old set eyes on an inspirational arrangement of black and white; a repeated pattern of interlocking ebony and ivory ranged across a stained teak box. An early translation machine, capable of converting and transforming spirit
into physical reality, the piano was an object that was to transform John Nightly’s life.
When Sindre, sitting sideways on to the Bechstein upright, performed a rousing chorus of a Norwegian Christmas song while at the same time managing to have an argument with Frieda and also eat his Christmas dinner, the small child, fascinated by what he heard but also by the fact that his uncle, playing entirely by ear, seemed to be paying little attention to what his hands were actually doing, approached the keyboard and watched carefully for a moment in a kind of trance, before placing his right hand on the piano and literally copying, though very slowly at first, of course, the melody of the julesang emanating from Sindre’s fingertips.
A few days earlier, at his grandmother Signhild’s dinner table, John had been transfixed by the berry-red concertina that rested on her lap producing a happy little tune as the old lady eased the brown leather handles in and out. Seeing the child’s amazement, Sindre had lifted up the boy and, holding the squeezebox in his own sausage-fingers, had given the boy a go. But the instrument was of course completely unfathomable and also much too heavy for him. John pressed the brass keys in anticipation, but nothing, except a couple of random splurts and squeaks, came out of the painted wooden box.
Next morning, John’s grandmother sat patiently with him at the piano while he imitated the shapes her fingers made when they fell upon the keys as she played through what she imagined might be anything very easy for the child to master with just one finger. But by the end of the following afternoon he was somehow adding a corresponding bass note, the whole family becoming distracted by the astounding progress of the newly regarded musical genius. This two-week vacation was John Nightly’s introduction to performing music himself instead of just listening and being entranced by it. On the morning the Nightlys were due to return to Cambridge, the boy walked up to the keyboard and began playing along, almost note-for-note, with the melody of the Grieg Lyric Piece that Sindre was listening to on the radiogram.
With the family back in Grantchester, John Nightly ceased all of the overactive behaviour with which he had terrorised both of his parents since he was born. All the tapping and beating on every available surface, the weird out-of-tune humming, the night-time whimpering due to the boy being terrified of the dark, and the low, morose drone he emitted whenever he was left alone, even for a second, without the company of either his mother, or Sandy, the filthy red mongrel John looked on as his partner in crime as they whimpered and moaned together from the safety of the cold, tiled floor beneath the kitchen table. Consequently, Frieda rarely left her son’s side. With John stabbing constantly at the family’s new second-hand upright, she would sit for hours gazing out of the garden window, particularly if it was a nice day, with her cup of tea and her magazine, a carton of her son’s favourite Kia-Ora ready on the sideboard.
If it was a typical Cambridge rainy day John would sit glued to a radio broadcast from some far-off location – Hilversum or Antwerp, say. Or he might run around with his little tin watering can, putting much too much water on John Snr’s potted cacti and chrysanthemums. Then, when Frieda got up to do the household chores, her son, like a little puppy dog, would cling on to his mother’s skirts and coattails as he accompanied her on her tour of the house. If he was being particularly difficult she would snatch and tug at him, dragging him over the carpets and the shiny parquet floor, the pair of them laughing loudly at their own wild, unruly, most un-Nightly-ish behaviour.
Profile In Music, Yehudi Menuhin talking to John Freeman, BBC TV. Saturday, 1 March 1963.
That ‘over-protection’ too, erm, was mainly with the idea of preventing any, er… any, er, unnecessary, useless, intrusions into the life, which, er, would merely be… disturbing. There were various well-meaning friends who might want to… spend some time or tempt the children with sweets or games of one kind or another; and, after all, to achieve anything one has to be serious about it and give it a part of each day. You cannot build unless you build every day…
Two years later, when John was six, an interruption occurred in this intense, airtight relationship when Frieda suffered a miscarriage at home and had to be admitted to Addenbrooke’s Hospital and kept in overnight. For the first time in his life John was without his mother for a whole day and night. Of course John Snr consoled his son and kept him occupied, but when it was decided that Frieda needed immediate treatment which necessitated her remaining in hospital for a further seven days, the boy soon became distraught. All the tapping and beating and whimpering returned, but much louder and weirder than before. John, now playing the piano for on average a total of four or five hours a day, was unable to understand where his mother had disappeared to, and he was not allowed to visit her. In an in-depth interview broadcast fifteen years later (Six Composers: BBC Third Programme, 3 June 1969), talking to the BBC’s John Cherry, John Nightly, the by-now-established pop star-cum-avant-garde composer, described this week as ‘one of the most traumatic of my life’.
When Frieda returned home from Addenbrooke’s, she no longer seemed at all like the same person to her young son. What had happened to his fiery, short-tempered, beautiful young mother? And who was this dopey, dumb old aunt who had replaced her? The transformation had come about initially because of the effects of the pain-killing drugs administered to help ease the discomfort and the ensuing depression following the operation. As it turned out, the cause was Drinamyl – a compound of amphetamine and barbiturate, known also as purple hearts and used by prostitutes in the East End of London to help them stay awake. The tablets had initially made Frieda show such an improvement, controlling her moods so well, that her doctor had prescribed a second month’s worth; but they had evened her out to such an extent that she literally wasn’t herself anymore. Another month’s prescription followed but, when Frieda asked for the medication to continue beyond that, Addenbrooke’s pharmacy insisted that she take no more of the magic blue pills, it being apparent that an immediate addictive response had taken place. It was then that Frieda moved into a more or less continued dependence on tranquilisers and antidepressants, then marketed as Valium and Librium, and thus set off on a course of prescription drugs to temper and balance her moods that would continue for the rest of her life, taking all of the life out of her while at the same time arguably making John the father’s life much, much easier.
One thing that John Snr did manage to get past his wife was that their son, despite being unable to read or write music, should be encouraged to practise the piano every day – though it later became difficult to get John off the instrument following the sacrifice of the family bathroom, which was eventually soundproofed by John Snr using a combination of egg boxes and offcuts of carpets from Pye’s soundproofed showrooms. Moving the big upright into the smallest room meant that the bath, the wash-basin and the lavatory had to be moved out, so John Snr had reconstructed the upstairs bathroom in the backyard, on the plot where the garden shed had been. He had then cut a small connecting doorway through to the carless garage where he had his tape-machines and other audio equipment permanently installed. In essence, this was a very early ‘recording-studio’, with a separate booth made out of nailed-together flower boxes and pallets. Recording stopped when anyone needed to use the bathroom, but this small hideaway became somewhere John Nightly Snr could record his son’s creations and even offer the possibility of overdubbing a countermelody or the odd bit of tambourine or tin whistle if required.
The result being that the already tiny back garden where John Snr propagated and tended rare cannas and aeoniums eventually disappeared beneath this ever-expanding construction, a shed-like observatory built to cater to the whims of his only child. There was even a quite good-sounding and rather eerie homemade echo chamber, which John Snr had managed to create by rigging up a microphone in an old water tank outside with a tarpaulin draped over the top. With only wax candles to light his way (part of the family’s quest to save on electric power), his son would spend days on end sitting in this draughty sh
ed slowing down 45rpm singles to 33 so that he could learn the guitar and piano solos in slow motion before transposing them back up and playing along with them in the original key. By the time John Nightly had turned twelve, in 1960, he had already composed and recorded several collections of piano pieces, noted down in Happy and Sad tunebooks along with various other birthday, Christmas and wedding songs for family and friends in this 6 x 5 shack, including a little minuet for Sindre’s wedding the previous year to his childhood sweetheart, Ulli.
National Geographic magazine. 31 January 1961.
‘Ham the Astrochimp’.
Three months before the first US astronaut blasted off, the ‘chimponaut’ Ham was strapped into a pressurised couch, locked into the Mercury capsule, and shot into the sky 156 miles above the earth on a 16.39-minute flight. Experiencing 17 times the normal force of gravity, but pronounced healthy after splashing down in the Atlantic, Ham* was given early retirement and spent the remainder of his days at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. His legacy had been established as a true explorer, one of the first pioneers on the final frontier.
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* On 3 November 1957, the Russians had launched their own muttnik – the space dog Laika – in Sputnik 2. She died from overheating and panic a few hours after lift-off.
item: ‘Canna “Lucifer”‘, Reader’s Digest Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Garden Plants and Flowers, 1971.
There are 55 species of these most attractive, tender herbaceous plants from tropical and subtropical America. Each flower is approx 3 inches long, with pale-red sepals, yellow petals and brick-red staminodes. The following varieties are recommended: orange-scarlet ‘Evening Star’, carmine-pink ‘J.B. Vanderschoot’, vivid scarlet and purple-leaved ‘America’, red with irregular yellow margins ‘Wyoming’ and deep-pink ‘Lucifer’. Cultivation: plant the fleshy rhizomes in pots or boxes in February or March. Place in a greenhouse with a minimum temperature of 16°C (61°F). In April, move the growing plants to 6–7-inch pots or into tubs, and grow on at a temperature of 13–16°C (55–61°F). Propagation: divide the rhizomes when shoots are visible.
