Nottingham University
I thoroughly enjoyed my time at the University, where I studied Classics. There were plenty of opportunities for practical music making, and I immediately joined the University Choir and the Chapel Choir. There was a small but active Music Department, led by Professor Ivor Keys. He was also Dean of the Arts Faculty, and it was said that he would drop a word to the other department heads about likely shortages in the orchestra, to see if they could recruit, say, a few more cellos or a french horn. I remember being asked at my interview about my interests, and I wanted to tell them about my singing, but when I said that I didn't play an orchestral instrument they changed the subject.
There were about 40 students in the Music Department, and there was a tendency for them to be rather patronising about the musical ability of those studying other subjects. So it is perhaps ironic that the only two people who have become well-known in the musical world from my time there, are the composer brothers David and Colin Matthews, who were studying Classics with me. David was a year ahead of me, and I am unaware of him being involved in the musical life of the university at all. It's possible that nobody knew he had already written a symphony, though it was never published.
I got to know Colin fairly well. I had always wanted to be a composer, and we used to discuss all sorts of musical matters including composition. However, while I would always run out of ideas by the second page, he actually completed works and I have the distinction of having sat next to him when two of his piano pieces received their first performances, at a concert of student compositions. We also were the full backs in the Classics Society football team.
At the end of my first term the university choir and orchestra gave a concert which included two choral works, Tallis's Spem In Alium and the first (and possibly only) performance of Wheel of the Year. This was a setting by Ivor Keys of a set of poems about the seasons of the year written by Audrey Beecham. She was a niece of Sir Thomas Beecham and was a real force of nature - a lecturer in one of the sciences and warden of a women's hall of residence. The music was fairly interesting but not memorable, though there were one or two catchy parts of it.
One of the first tasks when preparing Spem In Alium is assigning the parts to the singers. It is written for 8 choirs of soprano, alto, tenor and two basses. Ivor Keys's first priority (as I am sure it is with most chorus masters preparing this work) is to make sure there is a confident singer in each part. He was able to pick out eight sopranos, altos and tenors, mainly from the music department, but he didn't know 16 reliable basses. So he asked for volunteers. Though it was my first rehearsal and I had done very little bass singing, I was confident enough to put myself forward, and I became principal first bass in choir 7.
The logistics of preparing the piece were complicated enough without the added difficulty of finding and singing the notes. But I don't remember the rehearsals getting particularly fraught, and the concert went very well. It was a great experience singing such an unusual work. About 20 years later, when I had been a member of Bournemouth Symphony Chorus for several years, I discovered another member of the Chorus, Jean Harvey, had been studying French at the University - a year ahead of me - and had taken part in the concert. Then about 10 years later it transpired that a third Chorus member, Joan Ingarfield, also took part, being two years ahead of me. We had been singing together for all these years and this was the first time we realised that we three had a shared past.
At the end of my second term there was a concert of 20th century music. The choir sang Schoenberg's De Profundis, the orchestra played Hindemith's Mathis der Mahler and Webern's orchestration of Bach's Ricercare from The Musical Offering, and the concert was completed by the Stravinsky Symphony of Psalms. Though I knew some Stravinsky to listen to, it seemed at first a very strange work, but I grew to like it, and very much regret that I haven't had a chance to sing it since. The Schoenberg was a different matter. It is written in a rather severe serial form, and a further complication was that it was in Hebrew. I'm not sure that anyone in the choir took it seriously. As I remember we practised the first two pages quite thoroughly and hardly touched the rest of it in rehearsal. In the performance we were singing a very rough approximation of what was on the page; when the pitch went up we sang a higher note and a lower note when it went down. Nobody seemed to worry about how accurate we were, least of all Ivor Keys on the podium. This has been reminisced about by Jean, Joan and me.
In the spring term of the following year, we were given a real challenge. The choir joined up with two Nottingham Choirs, the Bach Choir and the Harmonic Choir, to perform Berlioz's Grand Messe des Morts, with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Ivor Keys himself conducted, and revelled in the occasion. I can't really remember what the orchestral players' attitude to him was, not being a regular conductor, but he knew how to handle them. On one occasion a rather grumpy women in the percussion complained that her score was not clear as to what she was meant to be doing (I think she was playing the tam-tam). So he asked for her score and it was passed down to him. He took a quick look at it and said to her "You hit it", which was greeted with laughter by everyone except her.
It was the first time that I (and no doubt many of the University Choir) had sung with a professional orchestra, and it was a baptism of fire. As well as a large orchestra, it requires 4 separate brass bands. In some performances they are placed around the hall, but on this occasion they were positioned on the four corners of the stage. One of the bands was very close behind me. When they first came in, most of us didn't know what had hit us. Professor Keys stopped them just before our first entry, which was a good idea because most of us were not in a position to sing. To us it seemed that however loud we tried to sing, it would be a futile effort expecting our voices to be heard above all the brass, but we were assured we weren't wasting our breath.
It is not an easy work to rehearse, especially if you have not heard it before, as some of it seems rambling and pointless when you do not know what is going on in the orchestra. This is particularly true in the Lacrimosa as it just seems to go on repeating itself. But come the performance it is a superb piece to sing, as all the strange looking accompaniment falls into place. Why it keeps repeating is because a new batch of instruments is being added. Right at the end there is a big build up by the trombones with the basses joining them at the climax. Magnificent!
There was plenty of music making taking place with students and visiting professionals. I remember one concert in particular where students were trying to be ultra-experimental. It included a performance of 4 minutes 33 seconds by John Cage. This is a piece where you can have as many instruments as you like, but nobody plays a note. On this occasion there were 4 performers with instruments that they did not normally play, including Colin Matthews on the trombone. The final piece was completely anarchic, with performers seemingly playing at random and members of the audience coming on stage and joining in. This was followed by a discussion when I remember asking what the difference was between what had gone on and the first performance of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, when there was audience participation consisting of continuous booing.
It was very useful that Ivor Keys had a lot of good contacts in the world of classical music, and we had visits from top performers. I remember the Swiss organist Lionel Rogg, a young David Atherton, conducting an orchestra that could have been a precursor of the London Sinfonietta, and the pianist Peter Katin, who gave a memorable performance of the Liszt Piano Sonata.
Equally memorable was a musical event in a rather different environment. Every Saturday in term time there was Union Night, which was a dance that took place in the Student Union building. There were two good reasons to attend. Firstly, there was a chance to pick up what were disrespectfully referred to as "town birds". As stated elsewhere, I have never been good at small talk, and this certainly extended to chatting up girls. I didn't have the confidence to go up to a female I did not know and engage in conversation that would make her show any interest in me. So I very rarely went along to Union Night. However the organisers were able to engage some well-known groups, and these included in my time Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, the Merseybeats and Long John Baldry.
Having got big into classical music as a teenager, I had a rather snobbish attitude towards pop music - it was OK provided they were genuine musicians. On the one hand you had groups like Herman's Hermits and The Love Affair whose records were apparently made not by them, but by session musicians. Then you had The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who who clearly knew what they were doing. I enjoyed listening to them and even on occasions went out and bought their records. One group that definitely fell into that category was The Animals, who were booked, I think, in my first year. Their performance was spellbinding, and Eric Burdon knew how to command a stage. Their greatest hit at the time was The House of the Rising Sun. In Malmesbury Abbey we have on occasions sung Amazing Grace to the same tune, and whenever we have done so I have thought back to that night.
In my final year a memorable event took place. Benjamin Britten's War Requiem was written for the recent consecration of Coventry Cathedral. Even though the first performance was reportedly not perfect, the piece had a huge impact. A recording was soon produced which sold lots of copies. I may have got this wrong, but I am sure I remember reading that it was the second best selling album of the year behind the Beatles' Please Please Me. I bought the record and played it frequently to fellow students. I really hoped that at some time in my life I would have the opportunity to sing it, but it seemed an impossible dream. So imagine my delight when I learnt that the University Choir was to join up with the Nottingham Bach Choir and the Nottingham Harmonic Choir to perform it. There were to be top class soloists and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, with Meredith Davies conducting, who had shared the conducting duties at the first performance with the composer. There were two slight drawbacks: an audition was required, and the concert would take place about 3 weeks after my final exams. Luckily I passed the audition, and I felt the rehearsals could just about be fitted in with my revision.
The first few weeks of my final term were therefore taken up with concentrated study and learning the music. We were practising two or even three times a week, really necessary for such a difficult work which none of us had sung before, but it all came good. And it clearly didn't adversely affect my revision, as I got an upper second class degree which was as much I could have hoped for. The performance was to take place in the Albert Hall, a rather different building to its London namesake. At the time it was the main concert hall in Nottingham and doubled as a Methodist Church. There was an ample stage and a very large organ, probably unsuitable for congregational singing, but ideal for the climax of the War Requiem when the organ piles in as the orchestra reaches its climax. The final choir rehearsal took place there the evening before the concert, and as far as I remember went as well as could be expected, apart from the fact that the organ ciphered at that climax. As the music gradually died down a single loud note blared away. The problem was fixed the next morning and everyone was relieved that it didn't repeat itself in the actual performance.
The day itself was memorable and lived up to everything I had hoped for. The soprano was Gwyneth Jones, who had a voice the like of which I had never heard before live. The sound that came to me when she was several rows in front with her back to me was something that stayed with me for a very long time. The tenor, John Mitchinson, was also superb, and the only disappointment was that the bass, Donald Bell, who clearly had a fine voice, was suffering from laryngitis and struggled at the top end of his register. The conductor remains one of the best I have worked with. He knew that while the orchestra were professionals, the choir were mostly inexperienced, and he was able to gauge our capabilities and draw the best out of us.
So my university experience ended on a real high, as a few days later I was back in the same building collecting my degree. It was a special time of my life, and I made a lot of friends, a good number of whom I am still in touch with. As it happens, none of them were involved in practical music making, apart from Graham Knight, Dave Read, Dick Amery, Phil Spark, Ian Balfour and Mike Littlejohns, who formed a rock group named Sheridan Lowe. They didn't get much further than posing for a publicity photo, but that was proudly brought out many years later at a 70th birthday party.
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