At the Concert

I was taken to a lot of classical concerts as a child, many of them in Leeds Town Hall. I didn't enjoy them. I didn't like the stuffy pomposity of it all. I didn't like all that palaver with the orchestra, all dressed in black and white, and the conductor calling them all to attention, and the solemnity.

It wasn't that I didn't like the music - well, okay, some of it I didn't like - but my dislike was more caused by all that crap it was wrapped up in. Any of the music that I might, perhaps, have loved, was ruined for me by the hallowed atmosphere.

Of course, I had to sit very quietly for a long period, but I didn't really mind that - I'd have been happy to do that if I had a book to read. But, of course, you couldn't read a book - it wasn't polite.

It was, however, light enough to read - certainly for someone like me who had practised the art of reading in almost no light every evening after I was supposed to be going to sleep. So I would read the programme, from cover to cover, in spite of the fact that it really wasn't very interesting.

And then my thoughts would wander. I should have been lost in the music: I wasn't. The music was lost to me. I'd be thinking about something else entirely.

I remember, years later, reading a book called The Shrimp and the Anemone by L.P.Hartley who wrote the rather more famous The Go-Between. In it one of the characters said that when they listened to music, after a while they didn't hear the music: it just made them think harder about something else.

Yes! That's me! I thought.

And I'm still like that. Not with rock or pop or modern jazz, though. With rock or pop, I either like it or I don't - and I often do - and, unless it's very dull, I hear the whole thing. With modern jazz, I generally just reach very fast for the off button.

But with classical music I think ooh, that's lovely - - beautiful - - those soaring violins - - ah, there's the brass coming in - - must pay the Visa bill - - need to clean the bathroom - - I wonder whether that actor will get an audition? - - what colour should the hall be when we decorate? - - how can I best phrase that letter ?- - oh, the music's finished.

If it's on the radio I just tune in again mentally when the announcer says something like "which Debussy wrote on his deathbed," because my mind registers that I'm now hearing WORDS!

I'm not sure whether I tune out of classical music because of my early experience at those concerts, or whether I would have been like this anyway. I find it very difficult to recognise most pieces of classical music, unless it's one I really really like.

This astonishes everyone. They think I am Uncultured. They say, "But, Daphne, you must know what it is!" and then do a lot of "I don't believe it!" when I say I really don't know.

If I really need to remember how a piece of music goes, then I invent some words to go with it. And then, for ever after, I can't hear the music without hearing the words too. If someone invents the words for me, then I'll remember the piece for ever, though not, perhaps, as its composer intended.

Remember Mozart's Horn Concerto, with Flanders and Swann words?
"I once had a whim and I had to obey it, to buy a French horn in a second-hand shop:
I polished it up and I started to play it, in spite of my neighbour who begged me to stop."

I haven't been to a classical concert for years so I don't know if they're still the same, with all that formal black and white garb and everyone sitting in reverential silence punctuated by the occasional burst of coughing.

If they are still like that, then I think it's doing the future of classical music a disservice.