No Longhairs at Cambridge

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 914, 15 February 1957, Page 8

No Longhairs at Cambridge

By

OWEN

JENSEN

TRINGS, wind players, singers, pianists, recorder players and com-posers-all together these make each of the annual Cambridge Summer Schools of Music a ferment of almost frenetic enthusiasm. But the thing that made the Twelfth School, finished a few weeks ago, quite unique among them, was its very normality. There were no longhairs at the Twelfth Cambridge Music School, no beards,».no eccentrics, no anti-social a ae ge See

CMalacrers, nO One so unsocial as to stand out like a knot in the

grain. There was * nothing of what is called — often euphemistically--"temperament." This is a ‘situation reputedly so rare among musicians that it is worth putting on record. And these were musicians, some of the best and keenest in the country. Violinists and pianists individually, had the edge on the rest of the nearly two hundred students who met for these fourteen days of music; but it was the choral group under W. H. Walden-Mills which outstripped all others in the polish of its work and, indeed, in sheer output too. The Fauré Requiem,. Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb, a Mass by the 16th Century composer Hasler, several groups of shorter pieces and a chapel service is a considerable assignment. To achieve it with assured competence as these singers did, is a remarkable accomplishment. The First Orchestra, conducted by Willy Komlos, and wind tutor John Field, gave creditable playings of Delius’s A Song Before Sunrise and Beethoven’s Egmont Overture. If their performances of Pro-

kofieff’s Classical Symphony, Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony and Mozart’s Serenata Notturna did not quite reach their best standards, at least the orchestra rehearsed and played this music and discovered what it was all about. They played, too, accompaniments to sundry concertos for strings and pianists, and | wound up the last concert with a riotous’ presentation of Saint-Saens’s Carnival of Animals which introduced in the twopiano parts successively almost every

planist in the Fiano Group. The Second Orches-

= " tra of less experienced players is usually content to fill a more modest role at the School. Not so this time. Having heard its alleged superiors, the Second Orchestra went back to its rehearsal room to reappear at intervals during the School under John Field and Larry Pruden, nominally tutor of the Composers’ Group, with performances of Symphony No, 31 in D by Mozart, Schubert’s Sixth Symphony, and Concertino for Piano and Strings by Gordon Jacob. In the afternoons, strings, wind and pianists hived off to practice and subsequently to perform chamber music under the supervision of Malcolm Latchem, Winifred Stiles, Molly Wright and the piano tutor, Lisbeth HolmJohansen. Inspired, no doubt, by all this adventuring, the recorder players added the spice of contemporary idioms to their excursions into early music. More contemporary than any, of course, was the music produced by the Composers’ Workshop and performed on the last night, a programme that took in various styles from the more conservative to a successful experiment in atonality.

All this music was turned out, if with varied accomplishment, nevertheless with unfailing zest and good humour. It was made by students from sixteen to over sixty, from Kaitaia to Dunedin, some from the cities, many from more remote places. Despite this diversity of locale and musical background, by the end of the first day or so, the two hundred students and their tutors were as closely knit a unit as any family anywhere. Their .only eccentricity was, as I say, the complete absence of those idiosyncrasies often attributed to musicians. This, however, was no spiritless, humourless, crowd of milk and watery highbrows. Vitality is an essential quality of any successful musical

effort. In youth particularly, vitality may blow the safety valve on occasion to shoot off a steam of healthy exuberance. There was the evening when a party of young bloods took time off from music to.raid the girls’ dormitories. (The girls, it should be said, were all away at the time.) The raiders might have got away with it, but in their anxiety to have the matter over and done with, they bungled the job, leaving behind them a mayhem of untidiness. Like most border incidents, it was difficult to place the first blame and it was no surprise, when the culprits were invited to step on the mat, that representatives of three parties from both sexes admitted to having been implicated. It was pointed out that the two faults were, undertaking such an assignment during a concertand doing it badly! Sentence: a day on fatigues, carried out with general good grace.

A holiday school cannot run smoothly without the members being willing to undertake various fatigues — shifting pianos (the least enjoyed!); preparing the concert hall and, the next day, dispersing the chairs again to the rehearsal toom; clearing away morning and afternoon tea and supper dishes. Each day there would be almost surely someone who would forget that it was his (or her) day on. Let’s be generous and say that it was forgetting and not shirking. The spirit always seemed to be willing if the flesh did sometimes find itself somewhere other than where it should have been. The salt of the fatigues were those stout fellows who, at the drop of a hint, were out chopping wood and stacking it for the last night barbecue. This was a School, not only of character but of characters. There was Alby, an army sergeant who enjoys his music during the year in a small town choir. Alby took all this music-making in his stride; much of it, too, over the edge of his customary musical horizons. And if the daily round of music began to get you down, you only had to share Alby’s evident wide-eyed and open-eared enthusiasm to be on top of the world again. And there was Aub whose piano playing usually finds its only outlet in small town accompanying and such like, who devoted as much concentration to his bit part in the Carnival of Animals as any virtuoso pianist -- and made it sound as convincing too. And Arthur the bell-ringer who missed only two bellsone when he over-slept and the other when he couldn’t drag himself away from an engrossing quartet rehearsal. Arthur was the School’s oldest student both by age and the number of Schools he has attended. As he wouldn’t be at the School when his birthday came along in March, the boys and girls at his dining table turned him on a birthday party complete with paper ‘thats and a candlelit cake. At the Twelfth Cambridge Music School everyone worked hard and played hard-and slept as little as possible. Looking back one remembers the music but, as re-invigorating is the remembering too of two hundred people of both sexes and widely differing ages and backgrounds, living and working happily together for fourteen days as civilised men and women,