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. */