growing up at the RAM

One of my earliest memories is of myself as a small boy sitting on a high stool and enjoying the sounds as I pressed down the keys of my aunt’s Dale Forte upright piano. I guess I was just two or three years old. And that may have been why my mother began to teach me to play. When I was four years old, the two of us walked onto a concert platform to play Winter’s Ride, a duet for four hands. A year later I played one of Mozart’s solos for a similar audience.

Then my mother took me each week for more formal lessons with Miss Beryl Knight who rented a tall narrow studio at the back of Mr Moon’s music instrument shop in Seymour Place. One of the most important lessons she taught me was to look up - and not at my fingers - when I played from memory.

My association with the Royal Academy of Music began when I was a pupil at St Mary’s (Church of England) Elementary School. For a few weeks a student from the RAM came to teach us singing. Before she left, she handed out leaflets to those of us who might be interested in joining Margaret Donnington’s Junior School at the RAM. My parents filled in a form. I was interviewed. I was accepted. Miss Knight was devastated. She had expected to take me through all the grades of the Associated Board and then prepare me for my Wigmore Hall debut.

We Junior Exhibitioners were a happy lot. I went once a week after school (the RAM was so near to my home) for a piano lesson with a sub-professor and again on Saturday mornings for various classes. Once in each term we played our solos at a Saturday afternoon concert for an invited audience in the Duke’s Hall.

I was three months short of my twelfth birthday when war with Germany began on Sunday the 3rd of September 1939. My younger brother and I passed the next three years as evacuees in Caerphilly. I had splendid piano lessons from Clifford Lewis in Cardiff and began to learn to play the church organ with David Williams who was blind.

We came back to London in time for the autumn term of 1942 and in the following January, when I was just 15, I was engaged as organist and choirmaster at St Peter’s Church, Fulham – very much a part of the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England. For me, it was a completely new experience. In later years I looked back on it as a splendid preparation for conducting opera. From my organ loft, perched high up on the south wall of the chancel, I looked down on the liturgical action with its solemn choreography and kept my ears open, ready to pick up the spoken and visual cues. The ‘remuneration’ was £35 per annum.

Back at Margaret Donnington’s Junior School at the RAM, some of us were now Special Talent Exhibitioners. I was fortunate enough, and very grateful for piano lessons with Madeleine Windsor and organ lessons with Douglas Hopkins.

This rather fruitful episode came to an unexpected end a little way into 1944 when I began my first full-time professional engagement. I was the pianist in The Solid Eight, an ENSA concert party on tour, entertaining some of the Canadian troops preparing to join the war in northern Europe. I look back with glee on this precious experience of show-biz. The nightly ‘on stage’ to live audiences several hundreds strong. It made an immense difference to my playing.

And so, inevitably, once more to the RAM. This time as a full-time student. On our first morning Sir Stanley Marchant spoke to us about our future careers as professional musicians, the joys and responsibilities ahead of us.

Douglas Hopkins was a fine teacher who took a personal interest in the well-being of his students. I learned my trade in his choir training class. We’d be faced with a previously unseen copy of an item from the choral repertoire. He’d call one of us out to conduct – at sight – another to play the keyboard accompaniment. Saved my life on many a crucial occasion in later years.

In my individual lessons he was gently encouraging. When I was influenced by new ideas flowing in from the real world outside, he stood by, correcting only when I went too far from the acceptable. With his gentle guidance I won the Henry Richards Prize for organ playing in 1946.

In 1947 I was called up for National Service in the army. In 1949 I went up to Oxford and came down three years later with an Honours Degree in Music. Egon Wellesz had been a great inspiration, assuring me that my own research and the conclusions I reached were more valuable than dependence on secondary source textbooks.

The 1950s saw me playing a small part in a UNESCO programme of international school holiday exchange visits, then moving on to grammar school music teaching. All the while playing the organ for church services on Sundays and Holy Days and taking choir practice at least once a week.

Towards the end of that decade my appointment as Master of the Music at Westminster Cathedral was accompanied by an invitation to join the professorial staff of the RAM.

The 1960s were wonderful times to be in London and to teach at the RAM. Carnaby Street positively fizzled. But it wasn’t just the bright new fashions that attracted attention. All sorts of new ideas were in the air. The Thursday Concerts on the BBC Third Programme introduced me to Schoenberg Webern Berg and a plethora of forward looking composers and performers, while the Beatles and the Rolling Stones captivated wider audiences. We endeavoured to play Bach as his contemporaries might have played him, then modified our performance to bring him closer to our modern audience. Should we play the Widor Toccata at the composer’s metronome mark, or should we take it a little faster? These were questions we asked ourselves and resolved every time we played.

Of course we were a minority, and even at the RAM a majority preferred to teach in the old traditional ways.

As my fortieth birthday came nearer I realised I stood on the brink. I too could go on doing the same things in the same way for the next twenty-five years. And then, one Sunday, the Observer and the Sunday Times carried display advertisements for the new position of Assistant Director at the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music in Sydney, Australia. A new chapter was about to begin ..

francis cameron, oxford, 06 september 2013