Today I rediscovered another of the many great pieces I've not listened to for decades.
Even 204 years on, one of "Papa" Haydn's most famous surprises still stuns and delights. After the nearest he can get to formlessness and dissonance (which isn't very), there's a slow and spare introductory recitative for archangel and very hushed choir before the fortissimo C major chord for everybody and full orchestra on the last word:
'Die Schöpfung', or 'The Creation', is one of many reasons I've always loved and admired Haydn's music so much more than anything I know by Mozart, apart from bits of 'The Magic Flute', the end of 'Don Giovanni' and his 'Requiem'.
With occasional passages listened to several times, the oratorio saw me through the commuter herds, parts of the African day, the long wait for tonight's hospital rendez-vous and the first part of my evening at home.
When first I heard it, long chunks of solo singing bored me, though a rousing chorus, especially a fugue, was guaranteed to wake me up.
I was too young to enjoy the nuances, the constant inventiveness of Haydn's orchestration in his musical illumination of successive parts of the myth set out in the opening pages of Genesis, the astounding originality of the work. For a man who reportedly had a very simple, optimistic faith, Haydn is remarkably subtle in the details of his lyrical tone-painting.
Nearly all my music "teachers" were stiff, distant people with iron rules, mostly men with little liking for their pupils. One woman with a big black upright piano used to rap my knuckles sharply with a wooden stick as I tried to play it because she didn't approve of my being left-handed. That was at the start of the '60s and she it was who taught me one of my first long words: ambidextrous. Short of being able to make me right-handed, this was what she wanted me to learn to become.
Since her, I've been able to perform certain relatively complex manipulations with my right hand, such as trimming my toe nails with bathroom scissors.
There were no home computers then. Nobody anywhere near music was building great websites like one I found tonight in that chilly part of far northeastern England where one of my artistic brothers lives.
"In Gateshead, musicians from the Northern Sinfonia Orchestra have got together with local schools to tell Creation stories through music. In May, the Northern Sinfonia Orchestra will perform The Creation by Joseph Haydn.
This tells the story of Creation found in the Book of Genesis.
We would like you to join in our storytelling. (...)"
I admire teachers like this bunch at Meteor Showers (Creation), who use brief sound files, an attractive text and visuals to interest children without patronising them.
These pages date back a couple of years, but are still on the web to explain just what kids might want to know about music, Haydn and creation stories from around the world -- and to provoke their own questions.
I'm going to start exploring the changing world of music and arts "teaching" -- as one of the "themes" of this 'blog and as an adjunct to my "normal work" -- in light of the enormous possibilities offered by modern multimedia technology. No doubt much has been done already.
The last time I was deep into such matters was in the late '70s when I was seeking out people like Christopher Small, whom I interviewed and wrote and broadcast about for the BBC on the strength of his then revolutionary new book, 'Music, Society, Education,' now described by UPNE -- the University Press of New England -- as a "classic in the study of music as a social force" (and one on my Amazon wishlist, since some sod never gave me my copy back).
I still have many notes from that interview, done in the banal suburban London home whence Small went on to pursue his dissection of the urbane, self-satisfied and snobbish "music-loving" community I'd learned to detest in the city's concert halls as much as he questioned the whole "system".
Next year, maybe, I should try to track him down to where it seems he sensibly found a place in the sun, in Sitges,
"a seaside outpost of Barcelona where he's lived with companion Neville Braithwaite since 1986. Designated a 'guru' by more than one admirer, Small is a tubby, affable man with a trim white beard who speaks in a ruminative murmur few would call charismatic; several times he apologized for not answering my questions snappily enough. But he certainly did have a book in him. In the end, in fact, he had three. But only Music, Society, Education came easy--he wrote his visionary critique of classical music's industrial-capitalist apparatus in less than a year. And that, Small figured, would be that. 'I expected it just to sink from sight. It never occurred to me that there was anything out of the ordinary about it.'"
So he told US rock critic Robert Christgau ('Thinking About Musicking') in 2000.
To be honest, in 1977-78, I too thought that book would sink without trace. It was but a stinging stone hurled into the smooth currents of an ocean of complacency. But if a butterfly's wing in a Brazilian rainforest can start a storm in China...
Digging into an old file of of yellowing articles and jottings tonight -- once Haydn's 'Creation' had been sung right through again -- I found a page of scrawl dating, I reckon from 1981.
"Language orders our thought," I wrote then. "Language achieves a precision which is deceptive. Topsy-turvy.
Music is a precise language IF you know the context --
Gregorian chant as God eternal.
Bach fugue as a 'feudal' system.
The romantic symphony as new, bourgeois order / AND / OR a battleground. Individuality.
Corporeality / spirituality in music. Harmonic structure, rhythm, dynamics. The printed score. Improvisation. Memory in music. Cross-reference. Tonality.
Resolution of conflict.
Milton Babbitt: order and relativity
Boulez: a mystic for our time.
Music does not so much CONVEY ideas as EMBODY them. It portrays.
The concert hall is for many people an escape --
the 'real world' is excluded,
favourite works give nourishment,
the new leads/
programme-rustling.
Words about music. Or Keller's wordless analysis.
The fundamentals of the 'primitive' world-view we have lost:
A relationship with nature so close that it strikes us as intuitive. The sense of community (in the music). The clear definition(?) of passage from one state to another. The 'visualisation' of same."
What the hell was I on in those days? With the girl of the time, it was rum and Coke, smoky jazz clubs, sex and late 19th-century symphonies and poems possibly oozing out of our fingertips, bad or not.
That lot, plus the pages that follow, must have been rough notes for a book which disappeared when I buried my imagination to become a routine hack with a dull eight in the morning to nine at night job.
 I wonder what Small makes of the Walkman, the MP3 player and the iPod. I wonder whether Apple shouldn't give iPods to kids like Bill Gates took to giving computers and Windows to Africa.
The thing about these wonderful gadgets is that they would make the most amazing teaching and discovering aids.
To be pursued, on other days...
I answered the phone only the third time the Wildcat called and that was very mean of me.
But I'm also happy, happy, happy. Because this time next week, the Wildcat may well be right here. With me. In Paris!
Her "exotic begonia", flower of the hour, has been "borrowed" from Dr Ronald de Fossard's species laboratory in Queensland.
I wonder why I thought of Pierre Boulez as a mystic... Boulez (the 'Project')?!
11:40:25 PM link 
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