There is a TED talk on YouTube by Itay Talgam that looks at the styles of different orchestral conductors - Riccardo Muti, Richard Strauss, Leonard Bernstein among them - and ends by making the case for the hands-off style being the best from a management point of view. That may very well be true. Hands-off was never an accusation you could throw at Barry Salmon. I don't really remember what he was like in rehearsal, compared to how I remember what he was like in concert - a leaping, whirling, demonic, dinner-jacketed madman, dragging sounds out of the orchestra by the force of his personality, spattering us with the sweat of his efforts. I may have made that last detail up, but he certainly needed a change of shirt after the performance. He was also as cool as you like away from music: that red Spitfire, the driving gloves, the hair. I remember our introduction to him and his subject in the first year, up there on the first floor of the music block with the practice rooms underneath. We were asked what instrument we would like to learn. The late Iain Thompson caused an outbreak of hysteria when he said he would like to learn the bagpipes. I believe Barry tried and failed to find a teacher for him. I gave up music as soon as I could, but carried on learning an instrument. Music study with Barry went the way of woodwork and Latin, that threesome of subjects that would have been so useful to me in later life if only I had the wisdom to have carried on with them. I loved music, and still do. A sort of passive love, expressed in the reverence with which we listened to Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and also in the cavalier way I treated practice, usually the five minutes before this week's lesson or before orchestra or choir rehearsal with Barry. From time to time, fragments and chunks of imparted wisdom from his lessons float to the top, about the lives of the composers, the subjects they wrote about, even some of the music theory that today I am struggling to get to grips with. I made up a mnemonic to help me remember the modes: In Dancing, Peter Loves Meeting Apricots and Lilies. You can have that one for free. I am sure that was covered back then and would have taken root in the effortless way it does with adolescents. I know that some of the questions I put to my trumpet teacher today were answered in those days, if only I had been paying attention. I also know that the love and fascination for music that I have today would have died without the influence of Barry Salmon. Prog rock was just one part of the wider world of magic that Barry's baton led to. My exposure to music, playing with a real conductor wearing a real dinner jacket was a thrilling thing. I could be a part of what I only saw in concert halls or on TV. Making music. It was as if I had been given a secret identity card: please admit the bearer to Wonderland. I would be interested to know how the gifted and the future professionals felt about that part of their lives and musical education. How did their time at W o Woolverstone and the musical environment affect the future rock and R&B stars, the classical musicians, the teachers, the singers and choristers who perform to the highest level? I am obviously not among them, my point of view is that of the determined amateur, full of wonder and amazement. Barry, the most important lesson you taught me with your cajoling and screaming and threats, was realizing that, given time, you can achieve something recognizably musical if you try hard enough, practise regularly and set your sights, erm, appropriately. Even the untalented, in whose ranks I belong, can contribute. Sadly that lesson did not take root while I was still at Woolverstone. But today, when I open my instrument case I can be confident that I am not about to make a complete arse of myself, and that does come directly from you. If you ever do watch Itay Talgam's TED talk, fast forward to the end. The last example he gives is Leonard Bernstein, arms folded, baton tucked under his arm, smiling at the orchestra as it plays, nodding and swaying in time to the music, demonstrating the conducting without conducting school of conducting. That was never Barry Salmon, outwardly, at least. Inwardly, I truly hope he feels some of that calm, quiet happiness at a job well done. Peter Warne June 2019 |