HARMONY

From Harmony, from heav’nly harmony,

This universal frame began…

The dead shall live, the living die,

And Music shall untune the sky.

That’s it, then. The whole shebang. From start to finish. Alpha to Omega – or A to G, actually, if you want to be musically literal and literate. [There really is a German supermarket chain called A and O, but I don’t believe it’s into eschatology, any more than the Southampton cheap furniture shop with SPQR over the door was trying to revive the Roman Empire; the letters stood for Small Profits, Quick Returns – context before interpretation – CBI for short – whoops!]

Of course, those quotes above come from Dead White Males, who else? [The only real alternatives are Feisty Black Females – but I give it twenty years before people think Whoopi Goldberg wrote The Colour Purple – and fifteen at most before that joke needs a footnote.] And when you’re talking about Music [which I am, in case you’d forgotten] the most tantalising DWM is Schhh…you know who. Not that he was a musician [so I’m not talking about Shostakovich, Schubert, Schoenberg or even Szymanowski]. He was a philosopher – though hardly in the Whitehead and Russell, offshoot of mathematics, truth tables and Wittgenstein mode. Schhh… Schhh… Schopenhauer wrote a weighty tome called The World as Will and Idea – only it wasn’t; it was called Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, and ‘idea’ is only one possible way to translate ‘Vorstellung’ [you’ll hear from me again about the wonders of the German language]. ‘Imagination’ or even ‘image’ might be more appropriate, though also misleading.

For Schopenhauer, at the centre of existence is THE WILL, a ruthless drive onwards, which manifests itself as gravity, indeed energy of all kinds, the sex-drive and so forth. We don’t perceive the unity of all these forces because they are disguised by forms – the ‘Vorstellung’, the veil of Maya. Music, however, Schoosch says, is the naked will, audible without any external form to disguise it. What about that, then, eh? And Nietzsche, in his early phase, accepting Schopenhauer’s analysis of existence but affirming the Will instead of denying it, saw Wagner’s music as total confirmation of that view. Which may explain why a head-person like me resists it – instinctively, not on principle.

Music, in general, I love, though unable to make it. A friend asked me recently when I was most myself, and when least. Least, I said, when cleaning the loo; most, when involved in creation – as creator, performer or consumer of creativity. So, when I clean the loo, I have to do it to music, otherwise I can’t face it. My higher centres need to be occupied. Not, of course, when I walk in the country. Music is an enhancement of reality, not a substitute for it. I am appalled by people who shut out birdsong and the wind in the trees. Ah well, they won’t hear the 4 x 4 either, as it roars up the by-way behind them. [Though music may be a legitimate way to drown out the noise of time’s wingèd chariot, as it, too comes up behind you, far too fast to stop…]

Before I became what I am now, I taught German at a university whose music department, in those simpler days, put on two free lunchtime concerts a week: professionals on Mondays, students on Fridays. By some hallowed tradition, the Professor of Music also conducted the city’s Philharmonic Society and the University Orchestra in choral juggernauts twice or thrice a year with distinguished bought-in soloists, but that’s neither here nor there, because I need to tell you about George. And about George. But I’ll start with George, because I had more to do with George, though not necessarily as much as I’d have liked to, because I was much older, and her teacher, and of course there was George, and George was very happy with that. Both Georges were, in fact.

Anyway, George, who must once have been Georgina, but now was only ever George, did German and Music, while George [who, as far as I knew, though I don’t think I ever bothered to ask, had only ever been George] just did Music. George had short, dark brown hair which cuddled her head and curled round it under the ears like the shapes of Ying and Yang. George’s hair fell over his eyes in a mousy-brown quiff that he had to keep on flicking out of the way. Sometimes, I wondered if the expressive head-tosses he did in performance were more to do with that, than with the music – but, to be fair, if I closed my eyes to listen, that thought never crossed my mind.

George had blue eyes and freckles across the bridge of her nose, and, dressed in a woolly jumper that wasn’t baggy but fitted her figure without hugging it, and in a pair of unisex cords [simpler times, I told you], she looked like a feminine tomboy. And the same was true when she wore a frock. Wholesome. Outdoor, but not aggressively so. Normal, but not ordinary.

However, when she sang… For a start, something happened to her face. It began to show emotions you had never expected she could have. Young as a child, old as a crone, scraped to a skull when Death sang to the Maiden. And then – her hands. Small movements to start with, sculpting the air, beseeching, commanding, imploring, reaching out for the unattainable – and then the whole body would bend and yearn. But never exaggerated, always contained within her own space. And that moment of stillness as she listened to the voice dying away. The voice, that almost coincidentally belonged to her.

And George, as a pianist on his own, wasn’t half bad. I’ve never heard anybody make as much sense of Beethoven’s ‘Tempest’ sonata as he did. Not by ‘interpreting’ it, but by recognising where each phrase came from, and making sure we did, too.

Good as they were apart, together they were unbeatable.

You know those Schumann songs where you think the performers have got their music mixed up, because you can’t for the life of you hear how the accompanying figure the song starts with is going to relate to the tune that’s engraved on your heart, you’ve heard it that many times? And then, suddenly, the singer starts, not on a beat, or halfway between beats, but just randomly, it seems, because there isn’t any space between the notes for the melody, but it slips in, like a sharp knife into the crack between snug-fitting stones that you never even imagined was there, but it is there, and as it opens up light bursts out of it, an otherworldly radiance all the brighter for emerging from such a small aperture, like the light in that Kafka story, just as the door’s closing and you’ll never get to the other side of it, however much you want to and however hard you try.

I suppose I’m thinking of Mondnacht from Liederkreis, Op.39, where the piano has single notes like spatters of moonlight through moving leaves or scudding clouds, until the voice lets loose the silver shafts from heaven to strike the earth: Es war, als hätt’ der Himmel/ Die Erde still geküsst… - of course, it’s the male heaven that kisses the female earth first, but let’s leave that problem to the composer whose wife’s a better pianist than he is, even though she has to run the household.

You can count to the voice’s entry, but the passage is marked ritardando, so, unless you know exactly how much the pianist’s going to slow up, it’s still guesswork, which is why most singers wait for the pianist’s imperceptible nod, or [if they’re too self-absorbed to think of giving one] watch their hands.

George didn’t do that. She stood with her head thrown back, exposing her eminently kissable throat, and her eyes closed in ecstasy, as if she was moonbathing, as if she would feel when the moonlight struck her, just as you feel the extra warmth when the sun comes out from behind a cloud. And imperceptibly you would become aware of her voice, would realise that she had begun singing a second or so ago, but that your chattering little mind had prevented you from hearing the very first sound that crossed the border from the Land of Silence, so you reproached it, and told it to shut up in future, and carried on listening.

They had that understanding, the pair of them. I always hoped their simultaneity extended into all the other areas of life where it could be useful. I didn’t know about it then, but amid the general mess of human relationships, where everyone asks for the right thing from the wrong person and vice versa, I wanted to be consoled by the thought that there really were two people who genuinely belonged together.

I wanted them to succeed, because I thought they deserved it. I could see the stages ahead: BBC New Generation Artists, Wigmore Hall, Edinburgh Festival, Snape Maltings, Brahms-Saal, Hohenems Schubertiade… I knew they would have found Anklang beim Publikum, as they put it in German: “they would have found an echo with the public” – no, that’s not it: the public would have resonated with them, in sympathy – their playing and singing would have created some kind of harmonic resonance in the listeners. There would have been some Mitschwingungen – some good vibrationsThat’s why I like the German language: because it makes things clearer, and leads you beyond the words.

They would have become famous, and I could have said, “I taught her how to do the umlauts, you know.”

But after they graduated, they just disappeared. I mentioned them to the Music Department, but it was Publish or Perish time, and performing didn’t really get a look in. In short, they just – vanished. Except from my memory. Where so many things still exist.

Until, one day, several years later… I had The Call. From My Agent. No, sorry, that’s a fantasy. It was a phone-call with a small c from the supply-teacher agency I worked for. They called most days, thank goodness, with more or less attractive jobs in more or less unattractive schools for differing periods of time. Pickings are so thin in fine autumns that you’re almost tempted to drive past a few educational establishments at kicking-out time and knock down the odd member of staff on gate-duty, but after half-term the summer-induced euphoria has gone, the new teaching techniques have proved as ineffectual as the old ones, and the first wave of flu has begun. Some days I could have been in five places at once. [Perhaps I should try that one year, if the schools are close enough – like Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters.]

The one I took was the closest to where I lived – really very close indeed. I’d never been there before, which usually meant it was a good school that had little long-term sickness among the staff, or a reliable set of loyal ex-teachers living round the corner. So I was looking forward to the experience, and hoping it would be repeated, so I could avoid a long drive – even though long drives meant I could listen to a lot of music.

Because it was close, I was early. Because I was early, I was sent along to the Music Department, which had a building all to itself. As I approached, I knew why.

Cacophony falls short. Superficially there may have been a resemblance to the excesses of “modern music” – which is no longer a helpful term, the way it was when atonalists dominated. But you know what I mean. If you don’t listen to Birtwistle for long enough, you might be forgiven for thinking it was noise; but it isn’t. The same procedures of pattern are followed as in any other music; it’s only a matter of getting used to hearing them. Familiarity breeds perception. Theoretically, the same is true of Elliot Carter, but I find it hard to listen for long enough to get there. What he tells you he’s doing in his lovely New England voice is always so much more impressive than what you can actually hear. The rebarbative surface prevents you reaching the beauty beneath – just as some people say that the polished, witty and urbane surface of my work stops people from perceiving or even suspecting that there’s something darker underneath – but that’s crap, and they bloody well know it.

But this – like several hammers, but with masters. Like that piece of conceptual music by John Cage, Imaginary Landscape No.4, with the twelve randomly tuned radios – only what was broadcast was better in 1951. Like – like – like – let me tell you what I saw and heard: one kid had disassembled some small xylophones and was hitting the wooden plates with each other. Another was producing Bartókian note-clusters by sitting in different positions on a keyboard [I used to think Jerry Lee Lewis did this in Great Balls of Fire!, but a friend recently advised me to pay closer attention to the video, claiming that JLL was actually using his hands under his bum and not playing with his podex – however, unless the lad was double-jointed, I remain dubious]. Three other keyboards had been set to play hip-hop auto-versions of Happy Birthday, Jingle Bells, and The Ode to Joy simultaneously, while four girls were doing a passable cover of Wannabe by the Spice Girls. Two lads were on the drums, seeing if one of them could pull his hand out between the hi-hat cymbals before the other clashed them together. There were additional elements, I’m sure, but I didn’t register them at the time.

And in the middle of all this, at her desk, was the music teacher. Long hair, splaying out with some kind of static I assumed, certainly not a perm, and sprinkled with grey, though the hair itself didn’t look old. A patch-work dress with bright thread stitching, but the patches themselves old and worn. No point in coughing politely behind her, so I walked round to the front. Her head was bent forward as she filled in some bloody form or other. I registered the glasses – old-fashioned circular granny ones, well out of fashion, copper-bronze. Then she raised her head, and I said, “George!”

And she said, “Sorry?”

And just then a properly permed and blue-rinsed, bright as a button, fifty-year-old in a tailored suit popped her head round the door and called, “Briefing, Georgina – didn’t you hear the first bell?”

Briefing, I thought, just like a load of bomber-pilots going on a raid, and some of you will not be coming back… but I didn’t say it. What I said was, “Süße Ruh’… wüsstest du…” and she looked at me and said, “It’s the beard – it’s so much bigger… But we’ve got to go to briefing, otherwise I get told off. Talk later. Kids! KIDS! Outside. Ready for tutor. They do so love making music.”

I didn’t teach the kids that Echo and the Bunnymen construct their songs over ground-basses, like Monteverdi and Purcell. I just spent the morning administering worksheets for the other music-teacher, who was away on a course. Among other things, I learnt that a popular form of American music was not the reds or the greens but the blues. One of the kids ringed round the reds and added MUFCOCK, which told me all I needed to know.

But lunchtime came, as it always does, with its promise of only one more lesson to go, and since George wasn’t in the staff-room, I sought her out in the Music Department. Alas, there was Music Club at lunch as well as before school. Those who could really play were in the sound-proofed practice rooms, leaving the music-room for the others, and George sat in the middle.

“Can we go in there?” I asked, pointing to the recording studio with the big window that overlooked the music-room – I’d only just noticed it. George looked around and said, “I suppose so – I can keep an eye on them.” Better than keeping an ear, I thought, but didn’t say.

So I told her how I’d escaped my servitude, and she told me how she’d entered hers. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“But I expected – you and George – you know – ”

“Ye-es,” she said, “so did we. But things happened differently. Even though I did get my umlauts right.

“It was that first summer, just after we graduated. The auditions for the BBC were in the autumn. We stayed around in Southampton, practising, because we didn’t want to go to one set of parents or the other – we wouldn’t have been able to live the way we wanted to, and that was important for our – music-making.

“Of course, we didn’t practise all the time – those rooms in the basement at the university were just grim, especially when the weather was sunny. We went out walking. You remember you told us about the Ox-Drove to the west of Salisbury? How you could get there by bus and walk up the hill and walk along a bit and go over and down into the Chalke valley, and then go up the other side and over again and come out at Martin and get the bus back into Salisbury?”

I remembered all right. I’d done the walk myself in the days before I had anyone to walk with me. In the days before I could drive. In the days when I still had – adventures.

“Well, that’s what we did. And we were having a drink in The Queen’s Head in Broadchalke when we started listening to the conversation at the next table. Perhaps because one of them was an American – one of those keen ones with thick black Buddy Holly glasses – and was talking a bit more loudly. The other one was English, upper-class, sandy-haired, gold-rimmed glasses, fussy.

“They were talking about a sale, a big auction-sale, and the arrangements for it. ‘How’re you going to accommodate all the people who’ll want to come along?’ asked the American, and the sandy-haired man said, ‘Marquees – just like any summer fête.’ ‘Is that safe?’ ‘We’re not going to store the stuff there – we’ll bring it in first thing in the morning – just the lots for that day – they can walk round it, and we’ll start selling after lunch. Each day over by five, I should think. How’s the cataloguing going?’ ‘Furniture’s done – a lot of really good stuff, with some rubbish that’ll go well because of the associations. Nothing much that goes with the age of the house, but a lot of Cotswold School – Gimson, Gardiner, a Gordon Russell desk – ooh, and an Eileen Gray chair. I gather she came to stay – ’ ‘Everybody did. Wouldn’t you have done? All the bright young things. And quite a few weirdos. Theosophists. Gurdjieff. Ouspensky – not at the same time, of course, clearly. A house like that in a place like this, with a famous photographer still young enough to be scandalous! How are the books?’ ‘Done – but there’s a lot of music in manuscript, and I don’t…’ ‘Read it? Nor me. Hmm.’

“Well, that was enough for George and me. We always knew what each other was thinking. We could see it all before us. We knew the house, just up the hill from the church, Queen Anne, like a doll’s house, with a lovely garden, roses everywhere. We could see ourselves staying there for a week or two, working together on cataloguing the music, and practising in our free time. There had to be a piano and it had to be tuned.

“We introduced ourselves – ‘We couldn’t help overhearing… ’ And they were really grateful. ‘It’s the way we do things in England,’ said the sandy-haired man to Buddy Holly, ‘by meeting someone in a pub.’ So we came back next day with clothes and washing things and food and drink (because we couldn’t afford to eat out in the pub every day) and set about camping out in the house.

“We were allowed to live up in the attics where the servants had been originally, and the less important guests later on. Low roofs, with large semi-circular windows at floor level – they had to be there to preserve the roof-line. And the music-room, with its big window, was at one end – there was a servants’ staircase straight down into it from the attics, the door concealed in this beautiful pale panelling that matched the light floor and even the piano. George said he thought it might have been maple, said it reminded him of a recorder he’d had once.

“Anyway, that’s where we spent our days. There were low cupboards all round the walls, stuffed full of music, and we spent our time getting it out and sorting it. There was a lot we recognised straight away – hand-copied because there was no such thing as photo-copiers in those days, and it would have taken too long to go and buy another copy. When George found something he didn’t recognise at first, he played it through, and if it still seemed unfamiliar he’d put it to one side for someone else to have a look at, to see if they knew the handwriting.

“It was late on the second day that he found one particular song that really struck him. He’d had the odd stuff before – Sorabji, something signed P.Heseltine (alas) – part of Loony Peter, as he liked to call it, transcribed for piano and voice from the instrumental group – and one of the Book of Gardens That Should be Hanged – another of George’s jokes – I used to put up with them. Anyway, we should probably have stopped for dinner. The light was beginning to go. The big window faced west, up the valley, so we had the light, but the sun went down sooner than it did elsewhere, leaving a long twilight that hung in the sky while everywhere else was dark.

“I still had my head in a cupboard, but when he played the first few chords I popped it out, bumping it in the process. ‘Come and sing,’ he said, and I went across to him. I’m not the best sight reader, so he fingered it out for me.”

She sat there for a moment, with her eyes closed, as if she was seeing it and hearing it all in her head. She took off her glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose, still without opening her eyes.

“La deee da daaa, la deee daaa, da da daaaa….”

Then she opened them and stood up at once, rapping angrily on the glass. The kids turned round from what they were doing, shocked. She moved to one side, opened the door and said, “Go AWAY! Go away NOW! You are NOT making music, you are making NOISE! Go – all of you!” They did – which was impressive. No argument, no delay.

She came back and sat down. “You can only take so much,” she said. “Only so much.”

“Could you sing that again?” I asked. “I didn’t quite…”

“No,” she said, “no, I couldn’t. I shouldn’t have sung it then.”

When she’d been telling the story before, I’d noticed how still she was. No movement, neither random nor deliberate. Now, her left hand was shifting on the surface in front, drumming, lifting, as if it was trying to stop itself drumming, drumming again, always in the same unusual yet familiar rhythm.

“The first time we sang it through,” she said, “nothing happened. It was just very, very beautiful. I remember we realised we’d both finished up holding our breath until the last notes died away. It was a lovely room to sing in. The voice and the piano both echoed, but they didn’t interfere with each other. It must have been that light-coloured wood, whatever it was.

“Then we started to sing it again. In the middle, there were passages that alternated, a solo for the voice, a solo for the piano. That’s where things started to go wrong. I was holding my last note, ad lib, as long as I wanted, and George came in over me. ‘What?’ I said. ‘It’s MY note!’ ‘You’d finished,’ he said, ‘I heard you.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I hadn’t.’ ‘Maybe it’s the acoustics,’ he said. So we carried on. This time I came in before he’d finished. No. That’s not true. I heard him finish, so I began singing. Then – then – I heard his piano, repeating notes he’d already played, over my voice. He – he – shouted at me. He’d never done that before. We’d never done that before. We were scared of what was happening to us. And all the while it was slowly getting darker, till we couldn’t see the notes any more. I walked across the room and fumbled my way to the door in the panelling and went up to the attics. I could hear him playing as I climbed the stairs. When I heard him reach the end, I couldn’t help myself – I started singing, and kept on while I went into our room. And I heard the piano join in. And while I was doing the solo passage, the door opened, and George came in and said, ‘Thanks, George. I heard you singing, so I started playing.’

“I didn’t say anything. I just grabbed him, and we tried to do the other thing we used to do so well together. Only this time, we didn’t. It was as if we were each listening to someone else. But at least we fell asleep afterwards. Only, in the middle of the night, I woke up and found myself singing, and I could hear the piano playing. So I stuck my hand out and found George fast asleep beside me.

“I couldn’t stay there after that. George did – he said he had to finish what he’d started, and I suppose he was right. I just went back to my parents and cried for a week. ‘Why don’t you sing?’ they said. ‘That always used to cheer you up.’ I couldn’t tell them the truth. They wouldn’t have understood. They just thought it was a pity George and I had split up, and wondered why we couldn’t get back together again – or why I couldn’t find another accompanist. They’re wonderful parents and they were sure that competent pianists were ten a penny, whereas voices like mine… But I couldn’t. I didn’t dare sing again, in case…”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I should never have asked…”

“My fault,” said George, “it’s been so long, I should have remembered what would happen, perhaps I even believed… Anyway, I put in a late application for a PGCE, and they were always looking for music teachers, so here I am. Still. However many years it’s been. You should hear our steel band!”

I diverted the conversation. “What about George?”

“Well, he wrote me some letters, said it was strange, but whenever he played the piano, he kept on hearing my voice… shows how much he really listened to it, doesn’t it? It wasn’t my voice he heard, any more than it was his piano-playing that I heard. And then he re-invented himself.”

“What?” I began to say, but the bell invited us, as if it had been cued in by John Donne. [You could hear it when the kids weren’t there.]

“Afternoon registration. We’ve got five minutes. Yes, he called himself Frideric. It was his second name, apparently. His Dad had a thing about Handel. Then he started a band, Fridericus Rex, like Franz Ferdinand, you know. He said it was actually short for Fridericus Wrecks Everything He Touches. They’ve even had one or two hits. I’ve got a video here – somewhere – there. Watch it, while I go and get the worksheets from Resources.”

It was standard stuff, jigging about, while he played the keyboards with one hand most of the time, occasionally doing leaping octaves with both hands before he settled back to vamping the accompaniment with one hand again. And tossing his head, to flick his hair out of his eyes. Some things never change. That was when I noticed two things. One was that his earphones were unplugged. Whatever he was hearing, it wasn’t what the rest of the group were playing. The other was his non-playing hand. It was tapping out a rhythm that I’d seen before that day. Over and over again.

George came back with the worksheets and I went off and covered the class and made a point of being first out of the car-park. As it happened, George was on gate-duty, and made me stop and wind down my window so she could say goodbye.

“I still know how to do the umlauts,” she said, “Süße Ruh’, wüsstest du… Sweet rest, didst thou but know…See?” And she smiled and laughed and time didn’t run backward, even though she waved and I waved back.

My agency called again the next morning, offering me work in the same school, but I said it was too long a drive, so they gave me another one that was three quarters of an hour away. That would have been just enough for a slightly draggy performance of Brahms’ First, but, since I prefer Weingartner’s faster version, I made it Elgar’s Second instead, and just sat in the car-park to hear the end of it.

When I started this story, I knew how I was going to end it. There’s a Purcell song, “Music for a while Shall all your cares beguile…” – but when I came to look it up, I found out a Shocking Fact. It’s from a play called Oedipus. That man had cares, I said to myself. There’s no way any kind of music is going to sort them out. Drink, drugs, maybe – forgetfulness, oblivion. But not even Wagner’s visceral noise could drown out the voices in his head – not even George’s steel band! (Whatever it might do for her, as I imagined her sat there, head back, eyes closed, bathing in pure racket.)

So I looked it up, just to be sure – context before interpretation, remember? And my next Shocking Fact was that the words were, in all probability, by Dryden, from whose Ode for St. Cecilia my first two quotations came. Serendipity or what?

And my third Shocking Fact was the real context, because I actually looked it up in the play itself. Teiresias, the blind seer, is raising the ghost of Laius, the former king of Thebes, the one before Oedipus, to find out how he was murdered. And the song is really part of a chorus that is sung to placate all the other ghosts that hang around waiting to be raised at the same time, discontented ghosts, be it said, whose cares will indeed only be beguiled for a while, who, although their pains are eased, will disdain to be pleased

Till Alecto free the dead

From their eternal bands,

Till the snakes drop from her head,

And the whip from out her hands.

9.30pm 17.viii.2009 –from an old idea, that I’ve even told at Storyclub