Music Among the Mills
Huddersfield offered a truly rare musical education
I imagine it went something like this, sometime in the 1870s:
‘Well, look what happened when that Franz Liszt chap played Huddersfield 50yrs back. A disgrace, frankly, for a man like that to be playing in a place like this. What’s the best, the most modern, concert hall in the world?” Alderman Woodhead fingered the heavy gold chain of his massive fob-watch.
‘From what I hear, sir, in Leipzig they reckon their new cloth hall - the Gewandhaus - is pretty good for music. And the Dutch are copying it for their new concert hall - or Concertgebauw - so I hear,’ the Town Clerk came back with.
‘I don’t know where you get your information, son, but if its good enough for Leipzig and Amsterdam, we’ll have one of those. Get cracking.’
And so it happened that Huddersfield bought itself a concert hall the pin-drop echo of two of the the best acoustics of the age.
Growing up in Huddersfield during the 1960s and 70s was not an all-areas access pass to the British elite. But it was still definitely ‘somewhere’, not least because the town could boast an astonishing musical life and musical heritage. Looking back, the cultural wealth I inherited from Huddersfield looks, and is, quite remarkable. I fear that today few children in any British town or city have the breadth of musical opportunities open to them which I soaked up as a child.
Some of it was a cultural rite as much as a musical event. Every year our family would drop our names into the ballot for tickets at the Christmas ‘Messiah’: an early draw would give you the choice of those tickets which weren’t already allocated to Huddersfield Choral Society subscribers. The annual ‘Messiah’ was, and still is, I believe, the sort of shared cultural ‘event’ around which societies construct themselves. You can bet that even today, every person in the audience will know every note of the Messiah, and most of them will at some point or other have sung it.
When the Huddersfield Choral sings ‘Every valley shall be exalted’ you can bet that includes the Colne Valley and the Holme Valley. When they sing ‘Worthy the Lamb’, down there in the audience there will be fingers rubbing along to test the quality of its wool.
In its heyday, the Choral was world famous and sang to the baton of Sir Malcolm Sargent. Here’s a taste of it. (Can’t resist repeating Thomas Beecham’s put-down: ‘Herbert von Karajan? - yes, he’s a sort of musical Malcom Sargent’.) Nevertheless, after each performance would come the judgement, on the soloists, on the orchestra, and on the choral. In West Yorkshire fashion, the verdict was usually etched in acid. Not as good as last year.
It was not all Messiah. Hundreds of West Yorkshire women and men screaming the Verdi’s Dies Irae down at you in the stalls was a genuinely shrinking experience for a young lad. Hearing the men intoning ‘All flesh is grass’ as a sinister waltz from Brahm’s requiem was scary in an altogether more politically menacing manner. (Still music I avoid, its passionate affair with death unsettles afresh every time.)
Even so, the Choral isn’t what dominates my musical memories of Huddersfield Town Hall. Rather, it was the extraordinary variety and depth of subscription concerts I went to. The ambition of the programming now seems very improbable. Yes, no doubt I heard every Beethoven symphony and piano concerto; Mozart and Bach were, of course, staples, as was Brahms. A regular musical diet of the Three Bs was taken for granted. But Sibelius, Mahler, Ravel, Debussy, Bruch, Respighi, Shostakovich, Vaughan Williams, Delius (local boy), Walton, Elgar, Bartok? And the artists? Well, we took it for granted that we’d be hearing some famous soloists - and not just at Messiah. After all, if Huddersfield was good enough for Liszt. . . But there were also unexpected ensembles, such as the visit a Suzuki school violin ensemble from Japan. Was it the music, was it the Japanese girls?
At the heart of these musical expeditions was the Huddersfield Philharmonic, and its association with the Huddersfield School of Music. When I first started going to concerts, it was conducted by Arthur Butterworth, composer and teacher at the School. That music school meant that the front row of the audience, or the ‘orchestra’ seats, would often be occupied by earnest young men bent over the scores they brought with them. (Poor conductor, subject to such pitiless scrutiny.) Similarly, the concert notes would tend towards the scholarly, sometimes providing the sort of blow-by-blow musical analysis that you’d more normally associate with the fearsome Donald Tovey. There was no excuse for ‘getting lost’ even in the most incomprehensible ‘modern music’.
Music culture spilled out from the hall. You’d often find the brass section in the pub across the road from the Town Hall mid-concert once they’d finished their blow for the evening. Thirsty work after all. At another pub adjacent to the Hall, the juke box offered Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Brahms with your pint. Lunchtime could be leisurely.
There are scenes from my musical childhood which now seem impossibly unlikely. There was the time, for example, when three generations of the family gathered at my Grandma’s front room to listen to the new Alfred Brendel recording of Schubert’s late piano sonatas. (My guess is it must have been the 1972/3 Philips recordings).
We sat there, all evening, just listening, three generations, to the ‘gramophone’, privileged to be among the first to be introduced to Brendel’s magic. Or the time when I was sent to my Uncle Gordon for the evening as my parents were out, where he introduced me for the first time to the worlds of Bartok’s quartets. That’s some babysitting.
Remember, in the 1970s-80s the opportunities to hear classical music were very limited. The internet was not yet dreamed of, and records were too expensive to even consider building a music library. (The Huddersfield Library, though, lent out classical LPs, probably mainly to the Music School’s students.) The only way to build your musical knowledge was to tape from the radio. Memorex was the cassette of choice, and my mother amassed hundreds of tape from Radio Three, a cache too massive to be truly useful. Her notebooks held her database of the recordings, but because she indexed by broadcast date rather than by composer, they were hardly useable. Bricks of hundreds of cassettes stacked on shelves, almost all unheard.
Still, there were exceptions. If you can picture a boy in his bedroom, captivated by the fragile and hard-won serenity of the xylophone’s upward scales at the end of the first movement of Shostakovich’s Fifth, playing that solemn symphony over and over to recapture that magic . . . that was one version of me.
All this suggests our family had already imbibed enthusiastically at the classical music bar. And this is true: my mother was a graduate of the Royal Northern School of Music, where - if she was to be believed, which, in fairness, wasn’t always wise - she was on familiar terms with then such bad-boys as Harrison Birtwhistle & Richard Rodney Bennett. Leather-jacketed bikers both, at the time, apparently. But music-making embraced a far wider demographic. For example, she was the conductor of our local village ladies’ choir, and I got to know just how competitive the singing-world could be. There were, after all, regular choir competitions, where teams of such ladies choirs would face off against each other - one compulsory test song, and one of your own offering. The competition was fierce, the levels of performance very high indeed. Each choir, after all, probably had a couple of members of the Choral to show them the way.
Set alongside that was the brass band tradition. Actually, the band in my village wasn’t brass, it was ‘silver’, though I’m not sure this was an identifier of relative wealth, or just happenstance. Still, being in the band wasn’t the exclusively male preserve you might imagine: one of my early girlfriends played cornet in a band, and I spent evenings down the local WMCs where they played.
What do I take from this? First, my Huddersfield musical literacy is something I value hugely. When I got to Oxford, it formed a layer of cultural protection against what could - ought, perhaps - have been a Northern boy’s social cringe. This was unconscious, but when the smartest scholars in the college started ‘taking up’ Beethoven’s late quartets as a cultural signifier, it passed me by - I’d assumed that, like me, they’d had them since they were in short pants.
So, all good then? No, although the good massively outweighs the bad, some was bought at a price to others close to me. The problem was that my mother, rightly proud of her musical knowledge, could use it as a tool to further some of her other, less attractive, projects. She decided that I was the musical one - indeed, with luck a musical prodigy. And so began my long, arduous and only intermittently successful pursuit of over-achievement. I have no complaints on that score.
But she also decided my sister was ‘not musical’, and impressed that judgement on her. This was a cruel nonsense, and it took my sister painful decades to know it for herself. And against my father, she used it as a welcome tool of self-assertion. My father cheerfully believed he couldn’t carry a tune - if so, he would have been a rare human indeed. But of course actually he loved music, and was particularly fond of Beethoven’s violin concerto. But he didn’t hesitate to declare his distaste for ‘this arse-riving modern stuff.’ My mother would put him down for his unsophisticated taste. This again was not merely cruel, it was stupid. (I guess we all now have stopped pretending to like the arse-riving stuff.) Like my father, I love Beethoven’s violin concerto and reckon its last movement is about the happiest thing Beethoven wrote. Even today, it rarely fails to leave the world in a brighter, happier place.
So I’ll end with Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, and with thanks for the musical treasury Huddersfield opened for me. Here’s Itzhak Perlman, Daniel Barenboim and the Berlin Phil in 1992. Know yourself lucky to have Youtube to serve you. . .
I remember Saturday mornings at the CBSO and an orchestra led by an electric flute providing children with an introduction to classical music. Peter and the Wolf is a prominent memory, with each animal represented by a different instrument.