The Roman Empire achieved its greatest geographical extent in the reign of Trajanus, emperor from 98 to 117. His European boundaries, roughly speaking, were the rivers Rhine and Danube. Then there were territories in western Asia with seaports on the eastern Mediterranean; in Egypt and along the coastal strip of northern Africa. In the western part of the Empire the official language was Latin. In the eastern part the lingua franca was the Koiné Greek established there by Alexander the Great some four centuries before.
Trajanus was followed by Hadrianus, emperor from 117 to 138, who began to shorten his lines of communication. On the island called Britannia, for example, Hadrian’s Wall was built to delimit the far northern frontier. South of that barrier (as every schoolboy knows) most of the country was subject to Roman military occupation. The official language was Latin, spoken and written by the ruling élite and the Britons who were closest to them. The remainder of the population spoke – so far as we can ascertain – various Celtic dialects. Of their written language, remains are few and sparse.
In the year later to be denominated as Anno Domini 410, the Roman legions packed up their kit and marched away, leaving behind them a Britannia subjected to raids from the Picts on the northern side of The Wall as well as intermittent forays by seaborne intruders. It was all part of a catastrophic movement of tribes and nations. The Romans with their ‘us and them’ attitudes categorised them all as Barbarians, because their common speech was neither decent Latin nor Koiné Greek. Barbarians they may have been in Roman eyes. Uncultured rabble they were not. Gradually, inexorably, they spilled over the borders of the once impregnable Empire. They came. Some settled. Others walked on. And these incursions were not confined to Europe. Problems with powerful régimes in Asia forced the Empire to move its capital from Roma to Constantinopólis, and to divide the Empire with its Greek East having authority over a Latin West.
In that Western Empire – nominally still to the West and the South of the Rhine-Danube line – there was often turmoil leaving profound cultural changes in its wake. Historians have called these centuries ‘The Age of Invasions’. Another term is Völkerwanderung, typifying the mass migrations which took place as whole tribes and nations poured in while the defences crumbled. Collectively those ‘wanderers’ are labelled ‘Germanic’ in contradistinction to the earlier inhabitants who had formerly been governed from Roma. It is a fascinating time. ‘Dark Ages’ only to historians with too little documentary evidence to contradict the widely held view that civilisation came to and end with The Fall of the Roman Empire and was not regained until the Classical Renaissance associated, in some minds, with the Capture of Constantinopólis by the Turks in 1453, preceded by the exit and transhipment of Byzantine scholars with their precious manuscripts who ‘brought the Light of Learning’ to the Medici in Firenze from whence it flowed delightfully all over Europe to connoisseurs all too thankful to receive it.
It is a distorted view, of course. The ‘barbarian’ infiltrators carried their own cultures with them. They just did not go to the bother of learning to write things down. Only in the eyes of Men of The Book is this a serious flaw of character. When the new arrivals eventually settled in their final locations, they became the foundations of modern European Civilisation.
I have been fascinated by the ways in which some of the immigrant languages survived while others did not. My current paradigm, for what it is worth, has writing as the most significant factor. In the Italy of Theodoric the Ostrogoth (reigned 471 to 526), for example, the written language was the Latin of Boethius (c.475 to 524) and Cassiodorus (c.490 to c.580). The common spoken language eventually became the Italian branch of the Romance family. The Germanic Franks who crossed the Rhine became the Merovingian Kings chronicled in the Latin of the churchmen while the Franks who did not cross the Rhine continued with their own vernacular. By the time of the penning of the Treaty of Verdun in 843, the details were set down twice : one in the Romance tongue of the West; the other in the Germanic of the East.
And what of the country we now call England? Why do we speak English?
Let us mentally go back to the time when global warming and rising sea levels finally cut off our country from the continental mainland. We may consider the islanders who survived as the original inhabitants of Britain. Cheddar Man, or one of his maternal ancestors, may or may not have been among them. We know nothing of their language. It is just possible, though not at all likely, it was not even IndoEuropean.
Before Julius Kaiser came on his exploratory raid, various Celtic dialects were in general use, including the Gallic spoken by those of the Belgae who had migrated from the mainland some decades before. Claudius engineered the landing of his taskforce (AD 43) and the general military annexation of Britannia. In some places they were welcomed. Some Britons assimilated. Others did not and sank into an underclass. Latin was the official spoken and written language. Where the Roman penetration was incomplete, Celtic dialects continued to be spoken and eventually achieved written status. But that was much later. In the year 410, as I have already mentioned, the legions sailed away. The mêlée on their continental frontiers demanded their prior attention. Britannia was expendable.
Enter the Saxons. A few of them had been here before, probing hither and yon, perhaps for trade, perhaps for loot, perhaps for Lebensraum. The story goes that postRoman Britannia was disturbed by the Picts from north of The Wall. Mercenaries were engaged to fight Britannia’s battles. They came in three keels to Ebbsfleet. They fought. They liked it here. They stayed. So the story goes.
More of them came. These were the tribesmen we may conveniently call Saxons. They were fighting men. As the situation resolved, the land now called England was occupied by a strongly stratified hierarchical society. At the top were the Saxon kings, commanding and supported by Saxon military aristocracy. Saxon landed gentry, with obligations of service to their overlords, completed the upper tier. The Saxon landed gentry were slave owners. We may assume that the Romano-British landed gentry assimilated into Saxon society, moved to the Celtic fringes of the islands, or crossed the Channel in sufficient numbers to colonise that part of the NorthWest now called Bretagne. In occupied Former Britannia, Saxon dialects were the official spoken tongues, solidly established and later committed to writing in a flourishing literature along with the scribal Latin of the churchmen.
When Guillaume le Bâtard headed his marauding battalions to victory at Hastings in 1066, they brought with them the Northman-tinted French of their adopted homeland. In their new territory Norman French remained the language of the military aristocracy. Latin the language of the Church. Old English, with its Saxon and Danish elements, survived because it already had, and continued to have, written form. In time English became the general lingua franca. French had its place in the law courts. Latin remained the language of international exchange even after Henry VIII (“Tudwr”) had taken the reins of the Church into his own hands and enacted an ordinance declaring English to the sole official language of his realm. (Some of the Welsh, rightly, have never forgiven him for this, nor have they ever given way to his will.)
Today the use of English is no longer confined to the Former Britannia. And even there its use is enhanced by a multitude of other tongues which arrived with yet more immigrants who also came and settled. The local delights of Regional Englishes are still with us despite, perhaps even because of, the ubiquitous telecasts.
Saxon military invaders brought their own regional variants with them. For six centuries or more their language coalesced, grew in strength and was committed to writing, firmly established and surviving. Spelling and orthography changed. Usage continues to change. Loan words proliferate. Neologisms attain prominence. Some fade away to become archaic or obsolete. Inflexions lose their force. Collective nouns modulate from singular to plural. Agendum is a thing needing to be done. Agendum pluralises as agenda. And like the neuter plurals of medieval Latin agenda in its turn is multiplied into agendas.
.. .. is now and ever shall be. So long as we continue to talk to each other.
© francis cameron
oxford, 15 june 2007
Saturday 16 June 2007
Wednesday 13 June 2007
Ronald Hutton's plum gems
The writings of Ronal Hutton are loaded with gems. Here are two from The Druids [2007].
page 7 :: “the Germans of the late fifteenth century were acutely aware both that they had achieved huge economic wealth and cultural sophistication and that the rest of western Europe, and especially the Italians, still regarded them as barbarians, in the style of the classical writers. This fuelled precisely the mixed sense of pride, ambition and resentment which was to make Germany the launch-pad of the European Reformation.”
That very perceptive comment – almost a throwaway line – just jumps out of the page. It is a precious gem I have not found elsewhere. Less complicated histories of the Protestant Reformation are usually couched solely in terms of the rebellious monk Martin Luther nailing his theses to the door of Wittenberg Church in protest against perceived abuses promulgated by the Roman curia. Hutton’s pointing to the seedbed adds a very cogent new perspective for which I, for one, am very grateful.
On a rather lighter note :: page 39 draws attention [yes, this is still relevant] to Dylan Thomas and his play for voices, Under Milk Wood, “set in the fictional and archetypal, small seaport town of Llarregub”; in consequential sequence, page 40 draws attention to Terry Pratchett’s Soul Music which “introduced a nation known as Llamedos, modelled on Wales.” Oh sod it! Bugger it! How come I’d missed that?
© francis cameron
oxford, 13 june 2007
page 7 :: “the Germans of the late fifteenth century were acutely aware both that they had achieved huge economic wealth and cultural sophistication and that the rest of western Europe, and especially the Italians, still regarded them as barbarians, in the style of the classical writers. This fuelled precisely the mixed sense of pride, ambition and resentment which was to make Germany the launch-pad of the European Reformation.”
That very perceptive comment – almost a throwaway line – just jumps out of the page. It is a precious gem I have not found elsewhere. Less complicated histories of the Protestant Reformation are usually couched solely in terms of the rebellious monk Martin Luther nailing his theses to the door of Wittenberg Church in protest against perceived abuses promulgated by the Roman curia. Hutton’s pointing to the seedbed adds a very cogent new perspective for which I, for one, am very grateful.
On a rather lighter note :: page 39 draws attention [yes, this is still relevant] to Dylan Thomas and his play for voices, Under Milk Wood, “set in the fictional and archetypal, small seaport town of Llarregub”; in consequential sequence, page 40 draws attention to Terry Pratchett’s Soul Music which “introduced a nation known as Llamedos, modelled on Wales.” Oh sod it! Bugger it! How come I’d missed that?
© francis cameron
oxford, 13 june 2007
Friday 8 June 2007
Francis at 70
Barenton, 80 Tutnalls Street, Lydney, Gloucestershire, GL15 5PQ
e-mail : francis@alchemyst.demon.co.uk
phone : +44 (0)1 594 842 363
from an original dated 22 november 1997
SEPTUAGESIMAL SYNOPSIS
I don’t remember much about last time, except that I was killed in the fighting on the Western Front in the Great War of 1914 onwards.
I know much more about the time before that when I set out to become a concert pianist but there was an accident which made this impossible so I turned to composition and to writing about current events in the musical world. Late in life I turned to Spiritualism - and some people thought me mad!
It’s no surprise then to find that this time I was born into a musical household where both my parents were practising Christian Spiritualists.
So I grew up in 1930s London. Of the outside world I remember the funeral procession of King George V, the abdication speech of King Edward VIII, and the coronation celebrations of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. In my own microcosm I was only three years old when I showed an aptitude for the piano and began to have regular lessons. I first played in public (by command of Her Royal Highness the Princess Louise) when I was four - and since then most of my life has been spent performing: as a pianist, an organist, a conductor and composer.
On the 3rd of September 1939 (the anniversary of Cromwell’s death in a thunderstorm) I was staying with my Auntie Lilla and Uncle Harry in South Wales. We listened to Mr Chamberlain’s broadcast. Once more we were at war with Germany. A few weeks later I became a pupil at Caerphilly Boys’ Secondary School and stayed there until the end of the particular summer term when we sat the School Certificate examinations.
I returned to wartime London with air raids, shortages, the blackout - and Mercers’ School.
Mercers’ was one of those medieval foundations with no more than 15 boys in a class and a pervasive pre-Raphaelite ethic which prepared us to be English Gentlemen: the 20th century equivalent of medieval knights in shining armour mounted on a white charger, riding out in search of the Holy Grail. Our word was to be our bond. Courtesy our watchword.
And alongside my school work I began a multiple existence which has continued ever since. On Sundays I appeared as the professional organist and choirmaster of an Anglican High Church in Fulham. During the week I attended seances at my parents home. There I witnessed some dramatic physical phenomena and learned extensively from the wisdom of the guides channelling through my mother.
Then in 1944 I was invited to make a professional tour as ‘the sixteen-year-old boy wonder pianist’ in an ENSA concert party. It gave me a taste for working in front of audiences - the larger the better - and improved my playing beyond recognition.
January 1945 was the start of a very happy period. I became a student at the Royal Academy of Music. Just going through the swing doors each day was entering another world, a world where life was transformed. On Sundays I was still a church organist and, on weekday evenings, there were more seances. The orthodox and the nonconformist complemented each other.
September 3rd 1947. Another of those significant days. I reported to an army barracks for two years of National Service where we were thoroughly brainwashed. There was still an aroma of the pre-Raphaelite public school ethic, but coupled with the dulce et decorum est of dying on the battlefield. We would charge out to destroy the enemy, or die gloriously in the attempt. Most of it was a terrible waste of time, though it did help to solve the unemployment problem for a government faced with thousands of servicemen and women returning to civilian life - and it gave me a full driving licence and a grant to study at Oxford.
It was on the day I was demobbed that I said to myself: ‘After two years’ without playing, if you practise for four hours a day you could be a first class pianist.’ Then I thought again: ‘But there are hundreds of first class pianists, and you wouldn’t be satisfied with that. To be outstanding, you’d have to practice for six hours a day. Do you see yourself practising the piano for six hours a day? No. Then you must do something else.’
It was Michaelmas Term of 1949 when I signed the books of University College and began to study in the Faculty of Music. Studying music here was very different from studying music at the Royal Academy of Music. There we were trained in the minutiae of performance. Here we were expected to develop our scholarship and to put the results in writing. It was a good foundation I didn’t really appreciate until later on.
The 1950s were tough. Here was I with a degree from Oxford but without a decent job. I went to work for the Performing Right Society, then became involved in the UNESCO international exchange of persons programme and combined this with a part-time school teaching post until a full time position came my way.
Towards the end of the 50s, my convictions moved me to become a Roman Catholic and to review my life. If I was going to stay in school teaching, then I was in the wrong job. I must find an appointment as Director of Music at a Public School. If I was not going to stay in school teaching, it was time to move out and find something else. A few days later I opened THE TIMES. (Yes, I read THE TIMES in those days.) An advertisement caught my eye. They wanted a suitable person to take charge of the music at Westminster Cathedral. Right up my street! There was a tedious period of waiting, and interviews, and waiting. Then they wanted me at once. The London County Council kindly released me from my teaching contract in time for me to take up my new duties a few days before the boys returned to the choir school.
On the day my appointment was noted on the Court Page of THE TIMES, the Principal of the Royal Academy of Music rang up and invited me to join his staff. So began the 1960s. I stayed only two years at the Cathedral and built a freelance career on the basis of my professorial work at the RAM. It was a marvellous time. Working with wonderful colleagues. All of us immersed in creating fine music. Early in 1965 I flew to New York, gave an organ recital at Columbia University and went on to tour Canada as an adjudicator at their series of competitive music festivals. One of my throwaway lines is: ‘I went to Los Angeles for Holy Week.’ That’s true and I could not have done it without the generous hospitality of my mother’s relatives who lived there. Good Friday found me back in New York and invited, courtesy of a very good friend, to a Jewish family Passover celebration in New Jersey. An occasion I treasure.
Back at the RAM I went on with my work with renewed confidence until my fortieth birthday came in sight. Every paper, every magazine I opened, seemed to have an article confessing that 40 was the time to give up, to realise you had climbed the ladder as far as you were going to go. You were not going to sit on the Board of Directors. There was no point in hoping for further promotion. What was I going to do? I wanted more. I wanted to move up.
Then one Sunday in 1968, a few days before Roy Jenkins was to deliver his first budget speech, I opened the papers (the SUNDAY TIMES and THE OBSERVER, of course) and there was an advertisement. The New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music wanted an Assistant Director. Right up my street! Right after the budget speech I drafted my application. There was waiting. An interview. More waiting. Another interview. More waiting. Then the invitation, packing belongings, selling a house, shipping aboard the P&O Iberia from Tilbury in November and arriving in beautiful Sydney just before a blazing hot Christmas.
Sydney Conservatorium was delightful in a rather old-fashioned way. My specific task was to bring it up to date, re-write its curriculum and establish its staff on the same pay scale as lecturers at the university. So the 70s passed in this way - along with the other attractions of Sydney: the sea, the sand, the steaks, the sunshine and all the rest. Then there were the wider horizons of Australia, an Australia gradually changing, becoming more liberal, more open to new ideas. Instead of knocking in vain on the doors of the BBC, I found myself booked by the ABC for several broadcasts. I conducted on television and at the Sydney Opera House, wrote music for a film and a play, and went hither and yon to talk with colleagues in other states and a public that was not uninterested in what I had to say. In my third year I was elected President of the Musicological Society of Australia (not such a grand position as might be imagined!) and in December was joint leader of its Ethnomusicological Expedition to the New Hebrides. It was another of those experiences that was to change my life. My pre-Raphaelite schooling had told of the White Man’s burden. While waiting two days for a plane in Noumea, I first took in the awful consequences of the white man’s colonial rule. Officialdom, traders and the missionaries - especially the missionaries - took away the native’s culture and left him at the bottom of the heap of an alien importation. Then, on the island of Aoba, I discovered the intricacies of the indigenous music and ceremonial. Not one whit less sophisticated than the white world of Sydney, London and the European homelands. I must learn more about the human race. I must enrol in the Department of Anthropology at Sydney University. And this I did. It took twelve months to do it, but do it I did. London and the Royal Academy of Music had made me a professional musician. Oxford made me a musical scholar: a musicologist. The New Hebrides and Sydney, between them, made me an ethnomusicologist. A man with a point-of-view that did not always sit easily in more constrained academic circles.
The other great adventure emanating from Sydney came in 1977 when I qualified for a year’s sabbatical, was allowed just six months, and returned northwards for a Grand Tour of European music libraries in search of the earliest evidences of music in the Latin West. I wrote a book in the process. It’s 100,000 words long and exists as a dot matrix print-out and a series of files on computer disks belonging to an obsolete operating system and therefore unreadable for all practical purposes. Fortunately my manuscript also exists and from time I time I take it out and continue the painstaking work of transcription.
By the autumn of 1979 (I speak in terms of southern hemisphere seasons) I was ready to return to England. My work in Australia was done. I did not want to stay there in a retirement where I could be car-less and isolated in a demi-paradise. A QUANTAS plane with more crew than passengers took me on board at 4.30 in the afternoon of December 31st. At 6.30 in the morning of January 1st, 1980 I was back on British soil.
I allowed myself the luxury of a self-financed year as a graduate student at Oxford, once again took up the duties of a church organist on Sundays and during the week combined a private teaching practice with an exploration of the expanding neo-pagan scene.
In the autumn of 1981 (northern hemisphere speak, this time) I sat in front of a computer for the first time and became completely hooked. A few years later I joined the university’s computer part-time teaching teams and worked happily with them for more than a decade.
/* I feel sure there was more of this in the original but the final paragraphs appear to have been lost in the process of transferring data from one machine to another and then to another. Never mind. What is already said still stands. I can fill in the 80s and onwards at some other time. */
e-mail : francis@alchemyst.demon.co.uk
phone : +44 (0)1 594 842 363
from an original dated 22 november 1997
SEPTUAGESIMAL SYNOPSIS
I don’t remember much about last time, except that I was killed in the fighting on the Western Front in the Great War of 1914 onwards.
I know much more about the time before that when I set out to become a concert pianist but there was an accident which made this impossible so I turned to composition and to writing about current events in the musical world. Late in life I turned to Spiritualism - and some people thought me mad!
It’s no surprise then to find that this time I was born into a musical household where both my parents were practising Christian Spiritualists.
So I grew up in 1930s London. Of the outside world I remember the funeral procession of King George V, the abdication speech of King Edward VIII, and the coronation celebrations of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. In my own microcosm I was only three years old when I showed an aptitude for the piano and began to have regular lessons. I first played in public (by command of Her Royal Highness the Princess Louise) when I was four - and since then most of my life has been spent performing: as a pianist, an organist, a conductor and composer.
On the 3rd of September 1939 (the anniversary of Cromwell’s death in a thunderstorm) I was staying with my Auntie Lilla and Uncle Harry in South Wales. We listened to Mr Chamberlain’s broadcast. Once more we were at war with Germany. A few weeks later I became a pupil at Caerphilly Boys’ Secondary School and stayed there until the end of the particular summer term when we sat the School Certificate examinations.
I returned to wartime London with air raids, shortages, the blackout - and Mercers’ School.
Mercers’ was one of those medieval foundations with no more than 15 boys in a class and a pervasive pre-Raphaelite ethic which prepared us to be English Gentlemen: the 20th century equivalent of medieval knights in shining armour mounted on a white charger, riding out in search of the Holy Grail. Our word was to be our bond. Courtesy our watchword.
And alongside my school work I began a multiple existence which has continued ever since. On Sundays I appeared as the professional organist and choirmaster of an Anglican High Church in Fulham. During the week I attended seances at my parents home. There I witnessed some dramatic physical phenomena and learned extensively from the wisdom of the guides channelling through my mother.
Then in 1944 I was invited to make a professional tour as ‘the sixteen-year-old boy wonder pianist’ in an ENSA concert party. It gave me a taste for working in front of audiences - the larger the better - and improved my playing beyond recognition.
January 1945 was the start of a very happy period. I became a student at the Royal Academy of Music. Just going through the swing doors each day was entering another world, a world where life was transformed. On Sundays I was still a church organist and, on weekday evenings, there were more seances. The orthodox and the nonconformist complemented each other.
September 3rd 1947. Another of those significant days. I reported to an army barracks for two years of National Service where we were thoroughly brainwashed. There was still an aroma of the pre-Raphaelite public school ethic, but coupled with the dulce et decorum est of dying on the battlefield. We would charge out to destroy the enemy, or die gloriously in the attempt. Most of it was a terrible waste of time, though it did help to solve the unemployment problem for a government faced with thousands of servicemen and women returning to civilian life - and it gave me a full driving licence and a grant to study at Oxford.
It was on the day I was demobbed that I said to myself: ‘After two years’ without playing, if you practise for four hours a day you could be a first class pianist.’ Then I thought again: ‘But there are hundreds of first class pianists, and you wouldn’t be satisfied with that. To be outstanding, you’d have to practice for six hours a day. Do you see yourself practising the piano for six hours a day? No. Then you must do something else.’
It was Michaelmas Term of 1949 when I signed the books of University College and began to study in the Faculty of Music. Studying music here was very different from studying music at the Royal Academy of Music. There we were trained in the minutiae of performance. Here we were expected to develop our scholarship and to put the results in writing. It was a good foundation I didn’t really appreciate until later on.
The 1950s were tough. Here was I with a degree from Oxford but without a decent job. I went to work for the Performing Right Society, then became involved in the UNESCO international exchange of persons programme and combined this with a part-time school teaching post until a full time position came my way.
Towards the end of the 50s, my convictions moved me to become a Roman Catholic and to review my life. If I was going to stay in school teaching, then I was in the wrong job. I must find an appointment as Director of Music at a Public School. If I was not going to stay in school teaching, it was time to move out and find something else. A few days later I opened THE TIMES. (Yes, I read THE TIMES in those days.) An advertisement caught my eye. They wanted a suitable person to take charge of the music at Westminster Cathedral. Right up my street! There was a tedious period of waiting, and interviews, and waiting. Then they wanted me at once. The London County Council kindly released me from my teaching contract in time for me to take up my new duties a few days before the boys returned to the choir school.
On the day my appointment was noted on the Court Page of THE TIMES, the Principal of the Royal Academy of Music rang up and invited me to join his staff. So began the 1960s. I stayed only two years at the Cathedral and built a freelance career on the basis of my professorial work at the RAM. It was a marvellous time. Working with wonderful colleagues. All of us immersed in creating fine music. Early in 1965 I flew to New York, gave an organ recital at Columbia University and went on to tour Canada as an adjudicator at their series of competitive music festivals. One of my throwaway lines is: ‘I went to Los Angeles for Holy Week.’ That’s true and I could not have done it without the generous hospitality of my mother’s relatives who lived there. Good Friday found me back in New York and invited, courtesy of a very good friend, to a Jewish family Passover celebration in New Jersey. An occasion I treasure.
Back at the RAM I went on with my work with renewed confidence until my fortieth birthday came in sight. Every paper, every magazine I opened, seemed to have an article confessing that 40 was the time to give up, to realise you had climbed the ladder as far as you were going to go. You were not going to sit on the Board of Directors. There was no point in hoping for further promotion. What was I going to do? I wanted more. I wanted to move up.
Then one Sunday in 1968, a few days before Roy Jenkins was to deliver his first budget speech, I opened the papers (the SUNDAY TIMES and THE OBSERVER, of course) and there was an advertisement. The New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music wanted an Assistant Director. Right up my street! Right after the budget speech I drafted my application. There was waiting. An interview. More waiting. Another interview. More waiting. Then the invitation, packing belongings, selling a house, shipping aboard the P&O Iberia from Tilbury in November and arriving in beautiful Sydney just before a blazing hot Christmas.
Sydney Conservatorium was delightful in a rather old-fashioned way. My specific task was to bring it up to date, re-write its curriculum and establish its staff on the same pay scale as lecturers at the university. So the 70s passed in this way - along with the other attractions of Sydney: the sea, the sand, the steaks, the sunshine and all the rest. Then there were the wider horizons of Australia, an Australia gradually changing, becoming more liberal, more open to new ideas. Instead of knocking in vain on the doors of the BBC, I found myself booked by the ABC for several broadcasts. I conducted on television and at the Sydney Opera House, wrote music for a film and a play, and went hither and yon to talk with colleagues in other states and a public that was not uninterested in what I had to say. In my third year I was elected President of the Musicological Society of Australia (not such a grand position as might be imagined!) and in December was joint leader of its Ethnomusicological Expedition to the New Hebrides. It was another of those experiences that was to change my life. My pre-Raphaelite schooling had told of the White Man’s burden. While waiting two days for a plane in Noumea, I first took in the awful consequences of the white man’s colonial rule. Officialdom, traders and the missionaries - especially the missionaries - took away the native’s culture and left him at the bottom of the heap of an alien importation. Then, on the island of Aoba, I discovered the intricacies of the indigenous music and ceremonial. Not one whit less sophisticated than the white world of Sydney, London and the European homelands. I must learn more about the human race. I must enrol in the Department of Anthropology at Sydney University. And this I did. It took twelve months to do it, but do it I did. London and the Royal Academy of Music had made me a professional musician. Oxford made me a musical scholar: a musicologist. The New Hebrides and Sydney, between them, made me an ethnomusicologist. A man with a point-of-view that did not always sit easily in more constrained academic circles.
The other great adventure emanating from Sydney came in 1977 when I qualified for a year’s sabbatical, was allowed just six months, and returned northwards for a Grand Tour of European music libraries in search of the earliest evidences of music in the Latin West. I wrote a book in the process. It’s 100,000 words long and exists as a dot matrix print-out and a series of files on computer disks belonging to an obsolete operating system and therefore unreadable for all practical purposes. Fortunately my manuscript also exists and from time I time I take it out and continue the painstaking work of transcription.
By the autumn of 1979 (I speak in terms of southern hemisphere seasons) I was ready to return to England. My work in Australia was done. I did not want to stay there in a retirement where I could be car-less and isolated in a demi-paradise. A QUANTAS plane with more crew than passengers took me on board at 4.30 in the afternoon of December 31st. At 6.30 in the morning of January 1st, 1980 I was back on British soil.
I allowed myself the luxury of a self-financed year as a graduate student at Oxford, once again took up the duties of a church organist on Sundays and during the week combined a private teaching practice with an exploration of the expanding neo-pagan scene.
In the autumn of 1981 (northern hemisphere speak, this time) I sat in front of a computer for the first time and became completely hooked. A few years later I joined the university’s computer part-time teaching teams and worked happily with them for more than a decade.
/* I feel sure there was more of this in the original but the final paragraphs appear to have been lost in the process of transferring data from one machine to another and then to another. Never mind. What is already said still stands. I can fill in the 80s and onwards at some other time. */
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