At the very moment we music educationalists are popping the champagne corks, along come a band of burghers from Manchester to spoil the party. Having wrung a whacking £332 million out of the Government together with a promise that every primary school child will be offered a year’s free instrumental tuition we had good reason to celebrate but Manchester City Council have forgotten an inconvenient truth: that in order to play a musical instrument you need to practise it.
Two violin graduates from the Royal Northern College of Music have received a draconian letter from the Council informing them that that their practising is ‘unacceptable’ and that their violins could be seized by antisocial behaviour officers if they continue to play them at home. Despite the fact that they “rarely practise for more than two hours and not every day or in the evening” the couple have fallen foul of “an irate upstairs neighbour”.
How I sympathise with these young players as I had a similar run-in – this time with “an irate downstairs neighbour” – when I was first starting to give concerts.
For whatever reasons the idea of actually owning a home seemed an alien concept to my parents so our hugely extended ‘family’ lived in a ramshackle late-Victorian block of flats across the road from South Kensington Tube. No. 10 Harrington Court was chiefly memorable for the ear blowing volume of musical decibels which burst forth from every room most of the day and night. My father’s electric organ, mother’s piano, grandmother’s deafening (she was deaf) television, elder brother Andrew’s piano and French Horn together with my own scrapings on the cello and occasional blowings on the trumpet might just have been tolerable but when concert pianist John Lill and Andrew’s lyricist – and avid record fiend – Tim Rice moved in as well it was a wonder and a tribute to the sturdy qualities of turn-of-the-century British builders that the whole block of flats didn’t descend on to the Piccadilly Line below.
We were all on the top floor, so there was no-one to be disturbed above, but below us lived actor Carleton Hobbs. However many tributes he may have received for his radio performances as Sherlock Holmes, nothing can match his award as the world’s most long-suffering neighbour.
So I was lucky during my student years but, by the early seventies, South Kensington had acquired the nickname ‘Saudi Kensington’ and Harrington Court was bought by Middle Eastern landlords who decided it was ripe for redevelopment. The only way they could get us out was to offer ‘comparable accommodation within the same area’ which was how, in 1973, I found myself practising in a mansion block with even thinner walls than before. I had just left the Royal College of Music and was commuting between London and Geneva to study with the renowned cellist Pierre Fournier. This was very exciting but the distinguished Frenchman had the tiresome habit of insisting that I bring a different newly-learned concerto to every lesson. This entailed enormous amounts of home practise – six hours a day being the norm – and matters reached a head when I was offered a chance to play an all Benjamin Britten recital on the South Bank at the same time. Now much as I love Britten’s music I have to admit that, when endlessly repeated, a certain section from the Moto Perpetuo of his First Cello Suite could – to an untutored ear – resemble the sound of a lawnmower relentlessly pursuing its business. This, at any rate, was the view of my downstairs neighbour who informed me that he would shortly be removing sundry parts of my anatomy if I didn’t stop “that bloody gardening racket”. Sad to say, certain elements in the Lloyd Webber household found this rather amusing but, for me, the news that I might very soon be lacking the requisite number of digits required to play this taxing piece could scarcely have arrived at a less opportune moment.
So now that we are poised to become a nation of instrumentalists I offer this little financial tip to those with a bit of spare cash: invest it in the soundproofing business.
