A catholic music taste - Conclusion

I think I've gone as far as I can go on this subject (for the time being at least and to, no doubt a sigh of relief by all), so thought I would take this opportunity to summarize.

I'm not keen on putting music (or anything else for that matter) into "pigeon-holes" and only use music genres to help me catalog my music collection. I do not consider myself a music snob, although I probably was when younger. I am of the opinion that "good or indifferent (to others), if I enjoy it, I do, if I don't enjoy it, I don't". That applies to many other things in life - food, beer, wine, theater, movies, etc. I remember well that in the 1960s peer pressure drove me mad. "Mod or rocker?", "trad or modern (jazz)?", "The Beatles or The Stones?", "Dylan or Donovan?" (in the latter case, neither). Today's youngsters almost certainly have even more peer pressure than I ever did.

From the simplest country song to the intricacies of a Mahler symphony, I have a love and indeed a need of it all. A few opening notes of say, Herman's Hermits "I'm into something good" and my mind immediately brings images of a Saturday evening at our local dance hall, the opening bars of "Tales from Vienna Woods" and I'm transformed to the New Years day concert in the wonderful natural auditorium of St. Michael's Caves, Gibraltar in 2003, and I cannot hear the Harvest Festival hymn "Come, ye thankful people come" without remembering my very first processional hymn as a choirboy many years ago.

I watched one of my favorite movies a couple of weeks ago on TCM, Carol Reed's The Third Man. I hadn't seen it for many a year and the minute I heard the amazing zither playing of Anton Karas, who also wrote the score, I recalled literally the smell of the burnt methanol exhaust of motor cycle speedway meetings in Great Yarmouth. That movie theme was extremely popular and played at every (weekly) meeting for a considerable time after the movie's release in 1949. Remarkable in that I was only five years old then!

I've used these examples just to emphasize what music means to me.

New Year Day concert, 2003, in St. Michael's Caves, Gibraltar - a wonderful natural auditorium.

A catholic music taste - part 2

Despite (or because of) the gentle persuasion of our school teachers to steer us away from the “perils” of rock ‘n roll, I liked the “devil’s music” (although my mother wasn't happy about that - I suspect today's mothers feel the same)! At the same time, I was still enjoying choral music at church, and slowly graduating from light classical to more serious stuff with a special affection for the music of two of the B's - Beethoven and Brahms.

The late fifties and early sixties saw a revolution in popular music and my father decided to purchase a radiogram. Despite my enthusiasm, I think it was because one of his customers had given him a large collection of 78s that really persuaded him. It was a grand piece of furniture, finished in walnut veneer with a large central speaker and manufactured by Pye. I was about 13, just in time for me to start spending my hard-earned wages (I had three jobs whilst still at school) on 45s. Can anyone reading this remember the first record they bought? Mine was Duane Eddy’s “Rebel Rouser” – not exactly a musical masterpiece, but it appealed to me at the time. My early rock ‘n roll favorites were popular English rockers Billy Fury and Marty Wilde and of course, the King, Elvis Presley.

By the time I left Great Yarmouth College to start on my five-year apprenticeship in the printing trade I had purchased a Dansette “portable” record player — state of the art, 3-speed with auto changer of which over one million were sold in the 1950s and 1960s. I could now play my music to my heart’s content in my own room – something of a novelty in the early sixties. Apart from rock ‘n roll, there developed another musical craze in England around this time – Trad-Jazz! It was based on traditional Dixieland jazz and there sprouted a multitude of bands across the country. Consisting of a standard line-up of trumpet, trombone and clarinet and backed by drums, base and banjo and sometimes piano. Three of the best known and most successful happen to be still going strong – Chris Barber, Kenny Ball and Acker Bilk. Needless to say, I soon got hooked. This gave me a taste of many traditional ragtime tunes and this coupled with my admiration of Glenn Miller gradually pulled me away from 60s pop and more and more into jazz, blues and swing.

Johannes Brahms - isn't this a geat portrait?

A work colleague was a great classical devotee and during one of our many lunch break discussions invited me to travel to London’s Festival Hall with him and his wife. The program included Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique and Brahms: Variations on a Theme of Haydn, both still favorites. Hooked again! I lost no time in subscribing to “The Gramophone” magazine and soon was ordering LPs (as we called them then) of more and more classical music. The music of the greats soon boomed from my Dansette. I say boomed because at that time I loved the more “stirring” orchestral stuff, obviously a legacy of the brass band concerts, and I didn’t yet appreciate the subtleties of piano sonatas, chamber music and the like. That was to come with age!

To be continued . . . . . . . . . . .