2 Music that changed my life

I grew up listening to 70s rock as my brother is 12 years older than me and therefore his music dominated the house when I was young. My father was sort of into swing, Glenn Miller, that sort of style but also had a few LPs of classical music, the usual suspects such as Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Pavarotti singing Nessun Dorma and so on which I, to my eternal shame, described as "poofter music" at the age of 9. The first piece of music which I really became aware of was Rossini's Thieving Magpie overture which my father had on an old 78rpm shellac disk to be used on an ancient gramaphone he had come by somehow.

You had to turn over the 78 as the piece lasts longer than the 3 minutes per side available. Despite the tinny quality to the sound reproduction, and the fairly shonky performance, I loved it.  It sort of started my interest in music which took off when I started the piano at the age of 10.  I've recently rediscovered a 78rpm version of this piece when teaching my AS class about early sound recording and reproduction.  If you want to listen to it click HERE.  There's a crazy gramophone shop in Edinburgh called The Gramophone Emporium, on St Stephen Street in Stockbridge, where the owners and clientele will wax (if you pardon the unintentional early recording technique pun) lyrical about these early recordings by Sir Thomas Beecham amongst others.


The next piece which really blew me away was Liszt's symphonic poem Les Preludes which I heard performed by my county youth orchestra in a big gala concert when I was 15. I'd never heard such fantastic music, such moving music, such sounds.  I'd not been playing the double bass very long and this inspired me to get to a standard where I could play in this group.  I've still never performed Les Preludes on the bass.  I did get to battle my way through 1812 Overture about a year later when I was of the required standard, however.

Overhearing my music teacher playing Saint-Saens Organ Symphony to a 3rd year class when I was in lower 6th again made me reassess the music I was listening to. I rushed out to buy a pocket score (well, rushed in the sense of saved up and travelled 25 miles one Saturday to Cardiff).  I loved listening to this piece.  I still do and am still amazed that everything flows fromjust a couple of motifs, much in the way that Les Preludes flows from the first bar.  Of course, most people now only know this piece as the loud bit was used as part of the sountrack to the film Babe.  Again I've not played this one live though I was asked to be one of the piano duet part once.  Anyone who knows my piano playing (ie can't do scales or indeed anything else technical, I'm better with honky tonk improvisation) will understand why I politely declined.


I got hold of Bruckner's 7th Symphony by accident when it was record of the month in the Britannia Music Club and I forgot to send back my slip saying that I didn't want it. Thank goodness I didn't. The 2nd movement, the coda of which was written as a memorial to Wagner, is awesome in the truest sense.

I only found out two months ago that German radio played it when it was announced that Hitler had died. Apparently he liked it too. However, Hitler didn't listen to it with the stereo on full blast with the speakers either side of his head like I did when I was 16.  Again I've never performed this (do you see a pattern emerging) but I have seen it live at least.  A pupil at the school I work in was playing the cymbal part, all one note of it in the 2nd movement.  Very nerve racking!!!!  Seriously...imagine getting that one note wrong on the cymbals...)
Then Rite of Spring came along after a drunken night out in my first year at university when one of the third year music students took pity on me when I said I'd never heard it (and I considered Vaughan Williams to be fairly avant-garde at the time). 10 pints of Wadworths and a kebab later a gang of us were back in his room and he stuck on the Stravinsky.
It was the first time I'd even seen a cd let alone heard one (we were quite behind the times in my neck of the woods). Wow...And yes, I've not performed it.
And since then very little has changed my life, well, musically anyway. I still tend to listen to the things I listened to for pleasure years ago eg Saint-Saens and so on, plus things I've learned to love through performing eg the music of Byrd and Palestrina, Bach and Handel. But very little new music comes through to you as you get older as you're not learning new ideas, finding new paths and so on unless, like me, you're a teacher of music and not afraid to ask your pupils what they listen to. In the last 5 years I've "discovered" bands I should have been listening to for years eg Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rage Against the Machine, System of a Down. And then one day I bought a cd on the off chance, having read something about the band involved in a music mag. This cd was Absolution by Muse and, for the first time in maybe 15 years, I had a revelation and my musical life was changed. I stuck the cd in the car cd player, pressed play and within 2 bars of Matt Bellamy's piano kicking in I was hooked. It gave me the same buzz, the same sense of excitement, the same sense of something new and wonderful that Liszt's Les Preludes had 20 years previously.  I bought their back catologue on the basis of this one cd and was not disappointed.  And live they are BRILLIANT. 

I'm waiting for the next piece to of music to change my life. Any style, any era, I'm waiting...