The power of music

The true sharing of music came to me from my father.  We used to sing hymns together over the washing up or in the car as well as more popular songs from his era.  Forty years on I still don't  know what it's called when one person sings one tune and someone else sing an entirely different one, but he taught me that song on the weekly journey across the home counties from Hampshire to my miserable boarding school in Surrey.  Singing in the car was the highlight of the week such that I don't think he realised how unhappy I was there. Few encounters with music have given me greater pleasure than singing with dad.  

That I think is what I was looking for when I joined the local folk nights in January of this year and, given the focus on individual performances I have not as yet found it. 

Dad told me, shortly before he died on Monday, that he had learned to harmonise and learned specific harmonies to songs at school. 

Dancing tango is a little like harmonic singing but harmony with another person requires what the word says, a perfect match and singing specifically with someone else is, if anything, an even closer encounter than tango where a perfect match is hard to come by.

If he had not gone into the army, he said he would have liked to do something with music. 

He sang on the radio, well, wireless, as a child, 'Good King Wenceslas' I think. On his fiftieth birthday, when he was a year or so younger than I am now, the officers in his garrison arranged for a military band to come and parade outside his bedroom window first thing in the morning. I am not sure if it was this or the champagne breakfast in the mess that gave him more pleasure.

He sang all his life, for fun and in church and though he did not often seem to find people to sing with, I think little gave him more pleasure. On holiday in Spain about six years years ago he sang one evening the 1949 Perro Como "Alphabet song" with gusto and with someone of his vintage but he sang it much more upbeat, more in the style of the Jimmy Dorsey version (1945) which could well be when he first heard it.    

If he didn't often find people to sing with he was undeterred.  Music was a constant accompaniment to his life, never the main event. He wasn't a choir-joiner.  I think it would have been too intense, too serious.  But somehow, as that constant accompaniment it also was the main thread, or one of them along with wine, golf, family, fun and an inveterate competitiveness.  

His attendance at church was largely, I think, predicated on the hymns as well as reading the lesson and just being part of that community.   He would also sing away in the audience in concerts, much to our embarrassment and later, amusement.   He was the harmonising baritone behind you at a carol concert.  He would sing in a shop or waiting in line.  He would sing anywhere and with a profound enjoyment and it was always fun.  He had no inhibitions and a good voice. We sang in the street on one of the last walks he was able to do. 

He liked romantic music: The Student Prince and The Desert Song by Sigmund Romberg, operettas that I think are forgotten now, but which was popular music in the mid 1920's, fifteen years before he was born.  I grew up on Mozart, Beethoven and the opera he lived: Mozart, Verdi and Puccini.  Tchaikovsky was as far as he would go.  No Berlioz or Wagner or anything more obscure. He didn't have much time for the Baroque, which I later discovered on my own.  

He loved Flanders and Swan, and Gilbert and Sullivan.  He remembered when Tom Lehrer came on the scene.  He liked music with fun in it.  

He particularly liked Bing Crosby and thought him easily the most sophisticated of the many good American singers of that era.  I think in Bing dad maybe found everything he enjoyed:  that light hearted, gentle fun, that sophistication and the romantic crooner.  I preferred Bing's jazzier, upbeat numbers though we found common ground in the song Morocco Bound from the 1942 film "The Road to Morocco" with the pun "like Webster's dictionary we're Morocco bound". But dad knew all the musicals from that era: Showboat, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Oklahoma!, South Pacific and the rest. 

He knew his boundaries and had limited interest outside of these but he knew a huge range of songs, particularly from the 1940s and 50s but also from the 20s and 30s.  I could pick almost any song from the 1940s and he would seem to know it. Rock and roll, Elvis and everything after him really held next to no interest for him. Even Ella Fitzgerald was outside his Pale. He really couldn't stand Scots music.  The young army officer didn't have time either for his long-haired brother, ten years younger singing 1960s protest songs so he wrote one for him instead.

But he loved Noel Coward, Cole Porter.   

I played music to him during his long days in hospital.  I think it may have been some of hist best times in  those hard weeks.  Occasionally, he even sang a little, delighting the nurses. I played him pieces from the Andre Rieu concert I took my mum to while he was ill.  He knew all the pieces.  You could see him reliving past concerts as he listened.  

Rieu said in that concert in Glasgow only a few weeks ago that music would support us all in difficult times and he was right. Dad was delighted we had enjoyed the show and remembered most of the pieces from previous concerts he had attended. Like Rieu, Dad loved Strauss, the New Years concerts, that light heartedness in music again.  

While he did ask for Mozart's clarinet concerto I was surprised that in hospital he particularly wanted the Bruch and Mendelsohn violin concertos, or Rachmaninov's piano concertos which were more serious pieces than his beloved Mozart opera. 

We thought he was quite likely to recover and had I known he would not I would have played him more.  

On the third day before he died I waited three hours for a long conversation with his doctor and played him a lot of music while I waited. I did not see him on the second day and the day before he died I was unwell and could only bring food and say hello rather than stay in the room, feed him and play him more music.  He had been increasingly unwell for some time but still, such is the power of music, I can't help but wonder if I had been able to play him music on those days whether it might have made a difference.

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About a week later someone told me about Jake Thackray who was born about the same time as dad and was also from North Yorkshire. He sang funny, clever songs like Noel Coward, like Flanders and Swan.  I was astounded dad never mentioned him.  He must have known about him. But Thackray was perhaps a bit folky, a bit lefty, a bit too protesty for dad.  That's the thing, when someone's gone.  It's like coming up to a blank wall where before there was a path - the thing's you still want to ask them.