Writing about music : The road not taken

For about a decade from the early 1970s, I was very powerfully engaged with music: both classical music - baroque, classical and opera; and also folk music - mainly English and especially Northumbrian, but also Scots and Irish, and especially "electric folk". 

I was almost constantly listening to, thinking about, learning about, performing, discussing or practising music of some sort or another.  

When I look back on those years, I am struck by the fact that I regarded music almost as a kind of salvation. Firstly for myself, where I though that music might be an answer to problems of purpose and meaning in life. 

And also, when it came to for folk music, that it would be part of a better future for England... 

I strongly felt that folk music could - and if given the chance would - deepen the national spirit, and become part of a re-engagement with the land and with each other.

I was also - and more generally - looking for a more active creative life. I was singing and acting, playing the accordion (but not particularly well) and a few other instruments in folk clubs and the like; and was involved in comedy performances including writing/ plagiarizing material. 

But I wanted something more originative than performance and adaptations; and was always experimenting with "creative writing" such a poems, plays and short-stories. 

As it turned-out, I had no talent for creative writing; but took quite rapidly (when I tried it) to "non-fiction" essayistic and journalistic writing; yet this avenue did not get-going until I was in my late twenties. 

What I now regard as a "road not taken" during those "lost creative years" was writing about music at that time when music was most important to me in the 1973-83 period*. 

Of course, I might not have been able to do it well - or even (more importantly) to my own creative satisfaction; but this can't now be known. 

It might be supposed that my lack of advanced ability at any instrument, my deficiencies in musical training, would have been a fatal deficit. But I didn't think so, and several serious musicians I knew well, regarded me as naturally insightful on the subject. 

But I did not even try; although there were opportunities, if I had asked for them - which I never did. 

Mostly this was not diffidence, but a kind of superstitious sense that if it was meant to happen, then it would happen - but if I tried to make it happen, then it wouldn't. 

This sounds a bit lame - but on the whole this has been the case through my life. Whenever I pushed myself towards some-thing by a conscious exercise of will-power: that invariably turned out to be wrong for me. 

Quite probably; me writing about music would have been, in some way a bad idea - which is why it did not happen. 

   

*[Actually, my very first published article was about music (a review of Rameau transcribed for synthesizers, done for a small specialist magazine) - but this was rather too late, didn't lead to anything else, and I had no chance to learn from it and develop.]