Memory Tuneful Early Odyssey [FULL]

My first love was the Spitfire. There is music about the Spitfire.

I first heard it in an assembly in my school at the age of five – Barham School in Sudbury, Wembley(Keith Moon of the WHO went there later). We were told how people could sometimes see dogfights high above them which are perfectly described in William Walton’s music. The music was written for a film about the designer of the Spitfire R.J.Mitchell.

I obviously LOVE this film!! The sound in the above video is not of the best quality, to say the least, but it has just enough emotion to satisfy most people’s love for this beautiful aeroplane.

The first concert I managed to get into was in the Albert Hall where Moiseiwitsch played Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’. I still remember the vigour with which he attacked the final movement – vigour that hid the sophistication of the music completely from me at that age. He really ‘swung’ the music like a celebration waltz in that final movement.

Somehow I DID manage to see an opera thanks to a member of the Covent Garden Orchestra giving us a couple of tickets to the Grand Tier. Can you imagine the effect of hearing this introduction then watching the curtain go up to reveal such a bright scene

and such musical action on a child? It was devastating!! Even at that early age, I realised that there was no substitute for LIVE music. However, the standard of sound received through radios and record players at the time made this very obvious!

I began to sing in a local choir and actually managed to become a Junior Exhibitioner at Trinity college. But parental intervention saw me end up at a military school. I was NOT cut out for a military school. However, any survival instincts made me join the choir in order to miss church parades. We actually did a broadcast on the old ‘Home Service’ of the BBC singing Beethoven’s Creation Hymn. There’s no decent YouTube recording of this piece so here’s a version by a great singer.

In the same broadcast, the school band played ‘The Standard of St George’, a great march by Kenneth Alford the greatest English equivalent of Sousa.

As soon as I discovered how long we had to stand still during trooping the colour, I naturally joined the band. At this school we didn’t just wander into meals. We had to form up outside our houses and march in. At lunch we had the luxury of a band playing although it was hard to hear it when we started marching. But, in the band, I had no need to march at all. We played the march and wandered straight into lunch. So began my love of marches.

Sousa is the greatest march writer of all time. I remember a march called “High School Cadets” because we had to march up and down playing ONLY this march for over an hour because one morning the RSM thought we were a “shower”, whatever that means.

I remember Kenneth Alford’s “Army of the Nile” was the march we always seemed to march off Trooping rehearsals to in the Summer Term. I used to love the sound we made when we marched between the school building and the Headmaster’s house. The sound of the Trio bounced backwards and forwards between the two houses.

Of course we had to play music for the “inspections”. When the temperature went below zero we always seemed to play Juventino Rosas’s “Sobre las Olas”

I liked the slightly unusual marches such as “Washington Grays”.

and the great continental marches such as Carl Teike’s “Alte Kameraden”

and that great march by Louis Ganne “La Marche Lorraine”

I enjoyed playing orchestral pieces arranged for band such as Hérold’s “Zampa” overture. I particularly enjoyed playing the clarinet solos in pieces like Offenbach’s “Orpheus in the Underworld”

At garden parties we play stuff like Gabriel Marie’s “La Cinqantaine”

or “The Grasshopper’s Dance”

and longer pieces like Albert Ketelby’s “Bells Across the Meadow”

A Ketelby winner was always “In a Monastery Garden” which even received a performance one year at the Last night of the Proms.

Why do I remember these last four pieces? I think it is because they are pop music of a bygone age. They can be played by anybody and are intellectually undemanding – just pure music.

The band did gigs now and then. We did the traditional ‘Beating the Retreat’. Here’s the sort f thing we did.

and sometimes played for march pasts to celebrate various occasions. i enjoyed all these gigs as it got us out of the boredom of school.

I did manage to play in the Kent Symphony Orchestra. I can only remember Mendelssohn’s “Italian symphony”

and the Wagner “Siegfried idyll” On the other hand, I remember with great pleasure torturing the whole school by playing the Hindemith Clarinet Sonata!

I staged a sort of musical revolution by forming a jazz band playing mainly dixieland arrangements which were in vogue then. An obvious start was a jazz arrangement of the old New Orleans march “High Society”. The clarinet traditionally plays the old piccolo obligato and this is the only solo I ever played from memory. It was the tradition and we all respected the old New Orleans.

Another march is “South Rampart Street Parade”

I managed to get to the ‘100 Club’ in Oxford Street now and again. I loved the band of Humphrey Lyttleton or “Humph” as we knew him. The “100 club” has completely changed its character nowadays but people are still aware that Louis Armstrong played there and the other greats that inhabited its earlier days,

Here is Humph’s band playing “Ce Messieu Qui Parle”. I never saw Humph playing clarinet but here he is paying tribute to the composer of this tune the great Sidney Bechet