Music

When I was very young I received from my grandparents in Italy the 78rpm record 'Little Red Monkey' that I think appeared in 1955. Despite the careful wooden packaging the record was partly broken, but I think it was still playable. Music mostly came from the radio, and 'Workers' Playtime' on weekday mornings, and on a Sunday morning we heard 'Two-way Family Favourites'. When an Italian operatic aria was played this was the cause of major excitement, and my mother had her special moment. My mother occasionally performed music - the nose harp - or sang a little. The nose harp consisted of humming through the nose whilst thrumming the nostril to define each note. I remember the song 'La montanara': 'Lassù sulle montagne', which was her particular favourite. Another song of the mountains I remember well was the 1953 song 'I see the moon', with its chorus 'Over the mountain, over the sea.' My parents did have an electric gramophone that played 78rpm records, and some time in the mid 1950s my father bought my mother a record player that would play 33rpm and 45rpm records, and I still have some of the records.
78rpm records have always fascinated me. There was a portable wind up gramophone of Geoffrey's that I remember, and some of the records, but when I was a teen ager I worked with my father at the home of one of his customers and acquired my own wind up gramophone that I still have. Miss Agnes Wormald in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, somewhere near St Werburgh's Road, had a chip pan fire, and I was given the task of scrubbing the smoke and fat off the kitchen ceiling ready for redecoration. She gave me some gifts: a set of recorders, descant, treble and tenor, that I still have, and some sheet music that I also still have. She also gave me her wind up gramophone and several records. I played Beethoven's fifth symphony repeatedly, and followed it on a miniature score from the Henry Watson Music Library at the Central Library. I also had a Schubert piano trio played, as I remember, by Pablo Casals, Thibaut, and Cortot, that I also repeatedly played. A special favourite was Fritz Kreisler playing the Beethoven violin concerto with his own cadenzas. These records were an important part of my education in classical music.
It was around this time that I started attending concerts of the Hallé Orchestra conducted by Sir John Barbirolli at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. Miss Maureen Hedwig, who lived across the road at number 15, was a season ticket holder, and when she was unable to attend a Sunday evening concert she would give me her ticket and I would go on my own. I also in consequence started to buy tickets myself. It was in this way that I saw performances of Elgar's 'The Dream of Gerontius', Strauss's 'Also sprach Zarathustra', and a concert performance, over two Sundays, of Berlioz' opera 'The Trojans'.
We had a piano at home, and my sister had piano lessons, but I managed to teach myself following the fingering on scores, such as Bach's 'Anna Magdalena Notebook' and easy pieces by Clementi. I also acquired a harmonium, on which I would play opera music arranged for keyboard, and hymns. I acquired a second instrument, this time a true French harmonium - my other instrument was in fact a reed organ - which was in fact more difficult to play well, and which I unfortunately painted white.
When I went to Exeter university in 1968 I elected to study music for two years as my subsidiary subject, and had had to learn quickly to catch up with fellow students who had already studied music and an instrument. I bought a double bass from Forsyth's in Deansgate, and I had a weekly lesson from the kindly and patient Mr Duguid of Exeter, and played in the university orchestra. I also attended concerts in the Great Hall by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, and spent many hours in the music collection at Knightley, then the music department, catching up with my musical education. David Cawthra was our lecturer, and Professor Arthur Hutchings an eccentric but inspirational lecturer. I remember a seminar with him before our examinations when he reassured me that I would pass because of my writing skills despite my lack of musical training and knowledge.
Whilst at university I also bought a grand piano that I still have, an enormous Erard dating from the 1860s. I paid £25 for it to the owners, who lived in a Victorian mansion in Plymouth Grove whose whom was to be demolished in the next few days. I brought the piano to Manley Road with the help of my father and his carrier, whose name I forget, managing to manoeuvre the piano down many steps from that house to place it in the bay window of what we called the dining room (though we never ate there) at Manley Road. It was tuned, and there I played duets with my sister Dana when home from university, especially Schubert's 'Marche Militaire'. By this time my parents were using the house to provide bed and breakfast accommodation for actors, singers and musicians visiting Manchester and performing at the Opera House and the Palace Theatre, and the piano was often played by them. I remember in particular it being played with pleasure by Monia Liter, a Russian born musician once of considerable renown. It was also played when a group of boys in a choir from Seaforth school stayed. I remember one was an Armstrong-Jones, and, I think, half brother to Lord Snowdon. With their choirmaster they would sing around the piano; I particularly remember Franck's 'Panis Angelicus'.
My first job after my  BA at Exeter and my MA at Leicester was as assistant teacher of general subjects at Okehampton School, for six months from January to July 1973. In some ways this was a challenging and unhappy time, living in inadequate accommodation, working without guidance and support, being taken advantage of by other members of staff, but also enjoying having some impact on children's lives. The first year 'remedials' I taught for six subjects in their timetable, as they were unloved and unwanted by the other teaching staff. They made a lasting impression on me. I did teach them music somehow, but I also ran a lunchtime recorder club, where we played seventeenth century music for recorder quartet, with myself playing the bass recorder, that I purchased at Greenhalgh's in Fore Street, Exeter.
After a year training as a teacher at Southampton university I became a lecturer at the College of Building in St Albans. I started going in the evening to the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden. I had grown up hearing snippets of opera, and when my parents became providers of theatrical digs I was able to attend opera performances in Manchester. I think the Royal Opera went on tour while its home in London was being rebuilt.
It was whilst I was a lecturer in St Albans that some of my colleagues in the department of General Studies helped to widen my musical education to include some popular music. During my first year at Exeter I had shared a room, and had thus discovered Leonard Cohen and still love his music.
It was at this time that I worked in France as a youth leader, and learnt many songs there, including the Italian partisan song 'Bella Ciao'.
In 1979 I left St Albans for Israel and got to know and love Israeli music, thanks to the free live concerts at kibbutz Ein Hashofet where we were studying Hebrew on the ulpan. It was there, when we went to meet my partner's aunt Inge at kibbutz Kfar Hanasi, that I also met her uncle Lou Segal and wrote down the notation for chanting the torah. When we returned to England I met Andrew White at a counselling workshop who taught me how to chant torah tropes. At Exeter synagogue when we became involved in the early 1980s it was Harry Freedman who took the services and was ba'al koreh - torah reader - but when he left Devon with his family and I asked him who would be able to take the services, he replied, 'You will, Frank'. I felt it my duty to do so, and learnt all the tunes so I could lead a service and chant the torah and haftorah, skills that I have never forgotten. I also studied at Jews' College in London under Chazzan Geoffrey Shisler, so that I would know the tunes for Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot. Later I learnt the tunes for New Year and the day of Atonement, and was privileged to lead services in Exeter and Plymouth synagogues. I also officiated at the last service to be held in the Torquay synagogue, and led part of the service for Sukkot in the Trieste synagogue in 2001. I have officiated at several weddings over the past thirty years, and at many funerals, and these also entailed learning new tunes. My Judaism has been very much expressed through traditional Ashkenazi nusach, even though I have studied a great deal as well. It is something I feel in my emotions rather than intellectually in my head.
Acquiring a small apartment in Trieste in 2002 gave me access to a whole new world of music and culture, and we regularly bought tickets to attend opera performances and concerts in the Teatro Verdi, but often there were other musical events taking place, or wonderful gypsy musicians performing in the streets and squares. Their music was similar to the klezmer music that we discovered in the 1980s when it was rediscovered and reinterpreted especially by American bands. It was at this time, when we went to live in Bideford, that I started playing the violin myself, my grandfather's violin that had been silent for eighty years. We had become friends with Joel Segal, and I had lessons in folk violin with his friend and housemate Ben Van Weede, and whilst living in Factory Cottage I practised a lot.
Nearly ten years ago we bought the flat in north London, and once we were able to ose it ourselves over the past few years we took advantage of it to attend performances at Sadler's Wells, the National Theatre, the Coliseum and the Royal Opera House, both for ballet and opera. I was due to attend a performance of the ballet 'Frankenstein' in June of this year when my illness prevented me attending, and three days later I was taken to hospital in Exeter where I discovered I was seriously and terminally ill. During my first three months in hospital music has been tremendously valuable: I am still deeply touched by music. I played repeatedly the songs of Georges Moustaki, having met his sister and other members of his family once at the synagogue in Plymouth, and had enjoyed talking to them in French and Italian. Carla Bruni I also played, having discovered her through our friend Armelle in Durtal when we had the cottage in La Chapelle St Laud. When first diagnosed I often played Tosti's song 'Vorrei morir', which others found morbid, but I loved its sentimentality and how it allowed me to grieve and come to terms with my own mortality.