by Andrew Ford
St Olave’s and St Saviour’s Grammar School for boys probably hadn’t helped in this regard. It was a ‘voluntary aided’ institution, state-funded but with its building program privately subsidised by a foundation that dated back to 1560-something, its original charter bearing the seal of Elizabeth I. So it was a privileged set-up – there were language laboratories, a swimming pool and Eton Fives courts (I never found out what Eton Fives was) – and the staff, whom we addressed as ‘Sir’ and in a few cases ‘Ma’am’, wore academic gowns. They included some inspiring figures, among them Giovanni Baldelli, the author of Social Anarchism, who taught modern languages, and an Australian teacher of English, Reg Renshaw, who ran the debating society and encouraged in his students the ability both to frame an argument and to listen critically to what others had to say. As so often goes with educational privilege, the staff also had its admixture of sadists and paedophiles: a games teacher who made us stand barefoot in the snow for twenty minutes; a history master who groped his favourite boys until two police officers took him away, mid-lesson. But there were no fees, the only price exacted being two religious assemblies a day. At these an organ played and the choir often sang an anthem or an a cappella four-part setting of the Lord’s Prayer. It was what you would call a musical school.
In my first week at St Olave’s I was auditioned for this choir, not because I was keen to join it, but because the music master auditioned all the new boys. Along with anyone else who could hold a tune, I was told to be at the Small Hall the following Wednesday lunchtime. On arrival, we were handed copies of Fauré’s Requiem, and by the end of the half-hour rehearsal I had had my first taste of singing from a vocal score, singing in harmony and singing in Latin.
Desmond Swinburn, the music master, was a sour man with a sharp tongue. Perhaps he was bitter to be wasting his talents on schoolboys, because he was undoubtedly talented; in particular, he was an excellent organist. But he was the worst teacher of any subject I ever had. His classes were devoid of inspiration and enthusiasm, and I imagine in the course of his career he must have ruined music for hundreds of his pupils: Richard Gill he was not. Lessons consisted of copying bits of music theory from the blackboard, but without reference to the sound of actual music. We were expected to learn about crotchets and quavers for their own sake. Occasionally we sang Benjamin Britten’s setting of Eleanor Farjeon’s ‘The Jazz Man’, or Stanford’s stirring song to Henry Newbolt’s words, ‘The Old Superb’.
‘Westward ho! for Trinidad, and Eastward ho! for Spain, / And “Ship ahoy!” a hundred times a day,’ went Newbolt’s poem. That got us all sniggering. ‘A hundred times a day,’ you see, was related to sex in our schoolboy minds; everything was related to sex, though none of us knew the first thing about it.
‘Colony,’ whispered Martin Holland one day at the bus stop.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Colony,’ he repeated, rolling his eyes. ‘It’s rude.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said.
‘It is,’ he insisted. He looked around to make sure we were weren’t being overheard. ‘Nudist colony.’
I suppose being cooped up in a classroom with these sorts of adolescent minds might alone have accounted for our music master’s caustic demeanour, yet in spite of his myriad shortcomings, I liked Desmond Swinburn. Partly, I think, I felt sorry for him, but I was also fortunate to be in that choir, where one saw a different side of the man. He was still sharp-tongued, but when he raised his baton, his musicianship communicated itself instantly. A former conducting student of the great Adrian Boult, he had a calm clarity to his beat and every movement indicated something important; nothing was wasted.
Fauré’s Requiem is not an obvious choice to inculcate a life-long love of the choral repertoire in children. Its harmonic subtleties, you might think, would be lost on the average child. I was a very average child – I’d never heard of Fauré and had no idea what a requiem was – yet this music swept me away. I remember relishing, as you’d expect, the boisterous central section of the ‘Libera me’, with its depiction of ‘that day of wrath’ (it was as though Fauré had set the phrase ‘calamitatis et miseriae’ with eleven-year-old boys in mind). But the delicate soprano solo ‘Pie Jesu’, which all we trebles sang in unison, was no less affecting, while the graceful viola melody at the start of the ‘Agnus Dei’ still makes me catch my breath.
By the time of the concert at the end of that first term, I was hooked. It wasn’t that I was a natural chorister, or really any kind of chorister. After the concert, my mother commented that I hadn’t appeared to be singing at all, my lips having barely moved. I suppose what I was doing, standing in the middle of that glorious noise, was soaking it up, and after six years at the school – by which time I was singing and reading music fluently – I had absorbed Handel’s Israel in Egypt, Samson and Messiah, Bach’s St John Passion, Christmas Oratorio, Magnificat and the cantata Sleepers Wake!, Vivaldi’s Gloria, Schütz’s Christmas Story, Britten’s St Nicolas, and smaller works by Parry, Stanford, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Holst and Delius.
Being in Swinburn’s choir was perhaps the most important part of my music education – more important than university, more important than composition lessons – because it formed the foundation. I wish all children had the chance to sing at that level: you learn to concentrate for long stretches; you learn to cooperate as a group, as a community; you learn above all to listen. And you carry the music with you ever after.
One of the immediate effects on me of the choir was that I began to explore classical music with greater curiosity. I still listened to pop music, but as the 1960s became the 1970s and I became a teenager, my horizons broadened. I finally began to read voraciously, I listened to the radio – not only pop radio, but classical music, drama and book programs – and, I suppose, I began to think for myself.
Paradoxically, thinking for yourself requires assistance, even guidance. There isn’t time to explore everything off your own bat; anyway, how would you know where start? So you follow the recommendations of those you admire, particularly those who have previously recommended books or films or music you have enjoyed or been impressed by. You need teachers and you need your peers – I was fortunate, particularly in the latter, because there were other boys whose curiosity was awakening at the same time as my own. You also need role models, and they can come from anywhere. Some are public advocates.
On the radio, the pop broadcaster John Peel was as important to me as to many thousands of others, his witty laconicism never quite masking a genuine enthusiasm for the music he presented. I sat by the radio with my family’s cassette recorder, pointing the microphone at the loudspeaker and recording hours of music that I would later pore over. Peel presented not only new recordings but also live sessions, such as Joni Mitchell singing the new songs from her album Blue, and James Taylor performing songs that would shortly appear on Mud Slide Slim; there was also harder-edged and more experimental stuff: the searing Scottish soul of Maggie Bell and her band Stone the Crows (‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’), the jazz rock of Soft Machine and, a little later, the avant-garde collages of the German band Faust. There was a serendipitous quality to my discovery, as there always is with good radio, and my cassette tapes thinned as they were played back, then recorded over, then played back, then recorded over again.
Sometimes the most important role models can be right there in your home. On my mother’s advice, I read Richard Hoggart’s magisterial study of working-class culture The Uses of Literacy, at least as relevant today as when it was first published in the year of my birth. Mum was relieved that I was finally reading and would often push things my way. When I was fourteen, she gave me D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow for Christmas, which we discussed at the time as a slightly risqué choice. And it was Mum who encouraged my classical listening. Somehow I had discovered Stravinsky’s The Firebird; Mum told me I should try The Rite of Spring. She was also good at correcting my sometimes wayward taste. Overhearing me listening to Wal
do de los Ríos’s Symphonies for the 70’s, Mum suggested I might want to try Mozart’s Symphony No 40 in G minor without the rhythm section. When I borrowed a friend’s copy of Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s Pictures at an Exhibition, she recommended listening to Musorgsky’s original piano suite. And when Miguel Ríos came on the radio singing his (let’s face it, execrable) ‘Song of Joy’, which I quite liked, it was Mum who pointed out that the tune was Beethoven’s and I’d be better employed listening to his ninth symphony.
3.
‘Freude, Schöner Götterfunken’
I lost my religious faith the day I discovered my father was a fifth columnist.
I say lost, though it is perfectly possible I never truly had it. But there I was, sixteen years old in my school uniform, wearing a paper badge that read ‘Jesus Saves!’ or perhaps ‘Smile, Jesus Loves You!’ – something of the sort. It was about five centimetres in diameter and stuck to the lapel of my blazer. The words, whatever they actually proclaimed, were in orange lettering on a purple background. It was the early 1970s.
‘Why do you wear that?’
As soon as Dad framed his question, I knew I’d been rumbled. I’m sure I blushed. Yet it was the obvious question, and what was this badge if not an invitation to ask it? Now that I’d been called to account, I floundered. Not only could I think of nothing to say to my father, I couldn’t even explain the badge to myself. At length, I mumbled something about God, to which Dad replied that he didn’t believe in Him.
Now, this was a surprise. My father was a man who could – and did – recite chunks of the Book of Common Prayer. Of course, it’s a quotable book, and Dad’s recitation of passages from the Creed or the General Confession were not of a particularly pious nature.
‘We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep,’ he once observed in the car, having taken several wrong turns; ‘Have you done those things you ought to have done?’ he was fond of asking in relation to my homework. And it wasn’t just the prayer book: there were quotes from oratorio too. He needed little prompting – a closed garage door would do it – to burst into ‘Fling wide the gates’ from Stainer’s slice of Victorian piety, The Crucifixion.
So there was all that, but there was also family legend. I imagine all families must have this, parents asked to regale their children with stories about the times before they were born. In our house, many of these tales revolved around my parents’ attendance at St Lawrence’s Anglican Church in Liverpool. All their oldest friends had been in the congregation and my sister and I called them uncle or aunty. I had the sense that St Lawrence’s formed a kind of bedrock to our existence.
‘Well, what about St Lawrence’s, then?’
‘I was recruiting for the Labour Party,’ Dad replied matter-of-factly.
Whether this was the whole truth, I never found out, but coupled with my shock at suddenly learning Dad was not a believer, and a second shock – slightly smaller and tinged with relief – that perhaps neither was I, came welling pride. My father was a man of mystery. An infiltrator, a spy. Almost a double agent.
Learning secrets about one’s parents can be discomfiting. When, as children, we demand to hear their old stories yet again, we want them to be the same as last time – legends become legends in the retelling, the listener waiting for familiar, reassuring words and phrases; we do not want to encounter elements in the stories that weren’t there before. But although Dad’s undercover work was all new to me, I was impressed.
So the badge was removed, and God went with it. But just as my father remained a quoter of the prayer book, so the accoutrements of Christianity never left me. Lines from hymns and verses from the Bible (and, yes, the prayer book) pop unbidden into my head as they did into Dad’s. Since I don’t believe in God and don’t wish to, I must be an atheist, but I am not a militant atheist, and when people such as Richard Dawkins insist that religion in history has only been a force for evil, I disagree. Setting aside everything else, there is the art that would not exist without religion, art that was inspired by faith and often paid for by the Church. That includes the poetry of Cranmer’s prayer book and the King James Bible.
In 2015 I was commissioned by four Australian cathedrals, two Catholic and two Anglican, to compose a mass – to be precise, a missa brevis, or short mass – for liturgical use. When I told my friends, their most common response, after a beat of incredulity, was the tentative enquiry: ‘But aren’t you an atheist?’
Let me say this was not a question asked by the cathedrals themselves, and there was no reason it should have been. They were commissioning a piece of music from me, so my relevant credentials were musical. The temptation to set to music Latin words previously set by Byrd and Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, Bruckner, Dvořák and Stravinsky was irresistible. And while many composers have been devout – in sixteenth-century England, Byrd risked his life for Catholicism; Bruckner’s whole musical output was an act of devotion – there’s also nothing to stop an atheist writing a mass. Moreover, if you remove from the list of liturgical music all those pieces composed by nonbelievers, you will leave a significant hole. Brahms is gone, for a start, and probably Schubert. Not that they wrote a lot of church music, but Strauss and Tchaikovsky can join the list, along with Sibelius, who composed some of Finland’s best-known hymn tunes. And the Anglican liturgy will be especially affected, for there will be no music by Parry (the composer of ‘Jerusalem’) or Holst (‘I Vow to Thee, My Country’) or Britten (A Hymn to the Virgin, A Ceremony of Carols and the Missa brevis he wrote for Westminster Cathedral).
Ralph Vaughan Williams, editor of The English Hymnal, was described by his second wife as ‘an atheist who occasionally lapsed into agnosticism’, yet he took to his editorship with gusto, even writing some new tunes for the publication (‘Come Down O Love Divine’, ‘For All the Saints’). John Ireland, who composed one of the English-speaking world’s most beautiful hymns, ‘My Song Is Love Unknown’, once declared: ‘I am a Pagan. A Pagan I was born & a Pagan I shall ever remain.’
Strictly speaking, I suppose we are all born pagans, but growing up in England, where the separation of powers has been compromised since Henry VIII, it is hard to avoid religion. As a small child in Liverpool, I was sent to Sunday school, which I disliked, and at my primary school sang hymns and Christmas carols, which I liked very much. In those twice-daily assemblies at St Olave’s, there were hymns, anthems, Bible readings and prayers. And there was the school choir: if a choir sings classical music, it will tend to be religious. But none of this accounted for that badge. My moment of teenage fervour can only be explained by two things, music and sex. Only the music was real.
As a teenager, I listened to everything I could lay my ears on: rock music, particularly the more progressive sort (for which I now have little patience), folk music, classical music and some jazz. In addition to my avid radio listening, I brought home, each fortnight, an armful of classical LPs from the local public library. This music became so important to me that I began, consciously, to explore the repertory. If, for example, I heard a Schumann symphony on the radio, I would borrow his others from the library. It seemed important to be familiar with the whole body of work. And some of it moved me to tears.
But there was one particular moment, an epiphany I suppose you’d call it. Nothing like this had happened to me before, and as epiphanies go I’ve had very little since that has matched it. I wish I could claim it had been something more recherché, but the music that floored me so unexpectedly was Beethoven’s ninth symphony, and the choral finale at that. It wasn’t the first time I had heard this music. On the contrary, the recording was the one I had bought a couple of years earlier at my mother’s bidding and since listened to numerous times (Franz Konwitschny conducting the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, since you ask).
The moment that got me comes midway through the finale, following the variation on the famous ‘Ode to Joy’ theme that Beethoven turns into a Turkish march, the tenor soloist joining in with a
tune that always seems to have escaped from a bierkeller. This is followed by a serious fugal workout for orchestra alone. But then comes a mysterious, ruminative passage in which the French horns have repeating F sharps in a rhythm reminiscent of a heartbeat. Over this, oboes and bassoons play a tentative ascending figure in D major, which leads nowhere; they try it in D minor, still nowhere; finally they settle for the dominant key of A and, without warning, we are whisked abruptly back to the chorus, loudly and triumphantly punching out Schiller’s ode in D.
That was the moment – and it shook me, literally. I was physically affected. There were tears, but there was also something harder to explain, something like possession. I felt the music had taken me over, taken me in. The music was inside me – in my head – but I was also in the music. This must be God, I thought.
Actually, I wanted it to be God, because I secretly hoped He’d help me locate a girlfriend. At a school for boys, it wasn’t immediately obvious how I might meet members of the opposite sex, but a couple of my friends attended the local Methodist youth club, and I knew there were girls there. Now that I had God, I could go too. Maybe there would be sex. In fact, there was table tennis, but at least there were girls in the room.
I don’t mean to mock my teenage self here, because something significant had indeed occurred in my life. C.S. Lewis wrote a late memoir of his conversion to Christianity called Surprised by Joy, taking his title from Wordsworth. For Lewis, the ‘joy’ in question might have been termed ‘longing’, since he also uses the German word Sehnsucht, and he describes it as coming in the form of ‘stabs’ of feeling for something far above him. I had been surprised by the ‘Ode to Joy’, and for a short time – no more than a year – was serious enough about religion to attend church, where I listened attentively to the sermons of the minister Hugh Temple-Bone. He was a gifted public speaker, perhaps the first intellectual to whom I paid regular attention. His sermons generally pushed past the half-hour mark, and I looked forward to them more than any other aspect of the services. I also enrolled in his confirmation classes and finally got confirmed. If my father had a problem with any of this, he never mentioned it; it was only when I took to badge wearing that he raised the matter.
