It’s the time of year when I see the practice nurse for the first stage of my six-monthly checkup. It’s a little early this year. I generally go rather nearer the Autumn Equinox. But there are times later on when my kalendar promises to be fuller but not hectic. 

So, yesterday I went. Ten past ten in the morning. And fasting. And I did so want that blessed cup of tea when the alarm woke me at ten to eight. So I deferred until after the appointment. Then to Zappi’s for a latte and a pain au chocolate.

Time, I thought, to get organised. Get away from the interminable 4th century. And do something differnt. Something new.

Thinking of something new reminded me of Ars Nova, a treatise concerning new possibilities for composing music, written by Philip de Vitry in the 14th century. I prefer to think of the 14th century as the 1300s. The 13 hundreds are also identifiable as the trecento. I decide to focus on the trecento until the Winter Solstice. Be content with what I can achieve in that period. And then do something else.

I begin to sketch a time line. Books immediately to hand suggest inclusions. Then I find myself myself looking at William “The Razor” of Occam. Born, perhaps, in the village of Ockham (Oak Hamlet) in late 1287 or early 1288. Died, without a doubt, in Munich on the night of 9/10 april 1347. 

It’s more than 30 years since I last looked at anything about Occam. There was something on the open shelves of the Radcliffe Camera and passing references, a sentence or two, elsewhere in my reading. Computers? Ha! Who now remembers the Sinclair ZX81? Google? What Google? The World Wide Web? Oh boy!. Get real!

At this year of grace,  researching for leads, is so much easier. Our William was a Franciscan who studied at Merton College. Merton College is metaphorically a few steps away in the centre of Oxford. 

Then he went to Avignon. I remember an evening between trains in Avignon. I went looking for the pont. Sur le pont d’Avignon. Found, instead, the Palace of the Popes. This was the Avignon Papacy in real life. Like a stage set. And in that palace in Avignon there once was a Pope John XXII, well known for his two lines in the standard histories of music for his diatribe against modern composers and the damnable choirmen who sang hockets like hiccups. 

This is going to be fun. The Franciscan and the Pope were at loggerheads. Some say they accused each other of heresy. The friar was excommunicated and did a midnight flit to Munich. Where he stayed for the rest of his mortal life. 

Well worth a visit. As they say in the Michelin Guides.

francis cameron

oxford, 23 august 2014

why are we here?

We are here to experience life to the full : the landscape that surrounds us; the people we meet and encounter; the goddesses the gods and all the other spirits who are there among us and among whom we make our way. All this, all these, are there for us to experience. And the wonderful thing is this : we get more than one chance.

In one lifetime we may enjoy a variety of experiences. Whether we travel far or remain in the same place, we can always increase the scope and intensity of our experience. We can sharpen our senses to the sights sounds taste smell and touch of our surroundings. We can relate to people we meet. We can get to know some of them very well – and in the process we can also get to know ourselves as we really are. We can get to know the spirits of the places where we live and the places we visit. We can also make contact with other spirits : those who are free to roam in the reality of this world as well as in other realities.

As we approach the time of our birth on planet Earth we may be well aware of the particular purpose of this visit – but the passage through the birth canal is akin to passing through the waters of forgetfulness. These are the waters that often dilute, or even wash away, the memory of the intentions we carried with us. But all is not lost. An astrological birth chart may remind us of the possibilities open to us in the time and place where we have chosen to be born. That is what an astrological birth chart does. It shows us possibilities. It is not a prescription. Still less is it the hand of fate or the force of predestination. We always have our power of choice, our freewill. At any time of consciousness we are free to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to the situation that confronts us. We do indeed create our own future. 

When this life ends we can expect our immortal soul and our eternal spirit to leave this their temporary home in our physical shell. For a while they may be visible to those sensitives accustomed to tuning in to the astral plane. In time, our soul and spirit – our real selves – move on to other instances of reality. We may be able to fill gaps left unfilled in that most recent incarnation or left over from others. We may attend the halls of learning. As time goes by – though there may be no reality of time – we prepare ourselves, and are prepared, for our next incarnation, our next visit for further experiences of life on planet Earth.

We have a choice. According to our state of readiness, according to the actions and inactions of our previous lives, and according to the path we choose to tread, the skills and responsibilities we carry with us, the tasks which lie ahead, the obligations we undertake – when all these are counted together, we are able to chose our birth family from those which are appropriate and are ready to receive us in the fullness of time and place.

Once more the birth canal will flow with the waters of forgetfulness but even these can become of lesser intensity as we develop the ability to pass through them with recollections of where we are coming from, where we intend to go, and what we intend to do. 

In due course, and it may take many lifetimes, we shall no longer need to ask ‘Why are we here?’. At all times of consciousness we shall be fully aware.

My friends, be well assured that as we sit here and now in each other’s company, we are well placed to develop just those abilities which will increase our awareness of what has to be done and how we should do it.

francis cameron

oxford, thursday 22 july 2004

curiosity ..

It started in the wolf cubs. We were the 3rd St Marylebone wolf cub pack. We met once a week in the basement hall of Paddington Congregational Chapel.

On that particular evening we had visitors. One of them asked me a question about the cubs. I didn’t know the answer and said “We haven’t been told about that.” ‘Ah,” said the lady, “but you could find out for yourself.”

At the time I was a little taken aback. The idea of finding out for myself was quite new to me. But it set off a spark of curiosity that is still alive. 

Later in my life, Egon Wellesz reinforced this notion. What I discovered for myself would be far more valuable than relying on textbooks reproducing secondary sources.

francis cameron, oxford, 03 april 2014

On reading Penelope Fitzgerald's 'The Beginning of Spring'

At the end of chapter nine I have put the book to one side. I go onto the web to see what others have to say about the complexities of writing fiction. I recall the label 'literary fiction' and I find a plethora of descriptions and definitions, some of which are diametrically opposed to each other. Not terribly helpful, though two observations are provocative.

"Literary fiction is the kind of writing which wins a Booker Prize."

Something worth thinking about. And I have half-a-dozen such prizewinners on my shelves. I started, but I never finished any one of them. They didn't move me. They didn't communicate. Ensconced in their ivory tower.

"You have to have studied at a university before you can understand literary fiction."

I absorb the implications of that thought. It's partway to explication.

I turn to chapter ten. I begin to read - slowly. It becomes hypnotic.

My conscious mind alerts. I'd been entranced by sequences of words, appreciating them as precious literary workmanship. And there they remain. Words on the page. Cerebral. Remote. Rarefied. I long for a shared experience of real flesh and blood characters. I want to be part of the sights, the sounds, the smells, that surround them. I yearn to be transported into the creations of the author's imagination. 

For now .. I rest. Earthbound. Unmoved.

francis cameron, oxford, 31 march 2014

from the open steppe to the promised land

from the open steppe to the promised land

Near the end of the 1970s I played Pong. Then came the concentrating excitement of Space Invaders.

Come the summer of 1981, I’d completed my postgraduate year and begun to look around. A Faculty notice caught my eye. Computing for Postgraduates. And top of the list was Fortran for Beginners. I was a postgraduate. I wanted to learn computing. I was a beginner. I signed on for the week’s course. On Tuesday morning the instructor wrote on the board c = c + 1. Oh dear! Not the kind of maths we did at school. Rather than admit my ignorance, I kept silent. By Thursday afternoon I understood. I was beginning to learn how to instruct a computer.

I stayed  on for a second week. This was simple and straightforward. We did BASIC in the Oxford Research Machines version. I revelled in printing out my results on a machine which patiently debouched lines of print on perforated sheets as wide as a roll of wall paper. I was hooked. 

I bought a Sinclair Spectrum as soon as it came on the market. Now I could spend hours programming at home. 48K. Color if you output to a TV. I wrote a simple home accounts program. I composed computer music. I squared and cubed. Took the Fibonacci series as far as it would go.

Rushed out to buy a Sinclair QL when Uncle Clive demonstrated one at an exhibition. Not the wisest thing to do! But there was a good set of applications. Word Processor. Spreadsheet. Database. and Graphics. And a publisher paid me what I thought was a fabulous sum for converting his Artificial Intelligence programs from IBM Basic to Sinclair’s idiosyncratic formulation. 

Enter Alan Sugar and the Amstrad PC. 640K of RAM. MSDOS on a set of 5.25” floppies. I learned to program in C on that machine and so became part of the team at the university’s computer teaching centre. 

I kept pace with Windows as each version came on the scene. I like Win7 but my Acer all-in-one is 4 years old and starting to show signs of decline. I bought a Win8 laptop - and was soon glad to pass it on to one of the grandchildren. 

Then the big decision.

I haunted a local Mac outlet. Waiting for Mavericks. Just before Christmas I signed the chit and came away with an iMac. I’m reminded of those long ago days when my unit handed in our trusty Bedford three-ton trucks and were issued  with spanking new QLs. Rolls-Royce engines with four-wheel drive on a separate shift. Noble steeds.

Bliss. It’s like joining a rather special club .. ..

francis cameron

oxford, 25 februaary 2014

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

memories of mercers' school

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