Vaughan Williams and the Juliana Hatfield Three
I had thought this book (Vaughan Williams: A Discovery of His Music) was going to teach me more about Vaughan Williams than about Simona, but the first chapters are very personal, beginning with her chance discovery, while listening to the radio as she ironed, of his Symphony in F Minor. The music "assaulted and transported" her and started a lifelong devotion to his music.
Her passion for music comes across so strongly, and is something I feel we had in common, albeit I don't think Simona would have enjoyed being crammed at the front of some dingy backstreet concert venue watching a band nobody else had heard of, as is my preference for live music. People who don't know me that well would be surprised, I think, to discover the depth of my devotion, particularly in my 20s when I would frequently travel 100+ miles to see one of my favourite bands for the third or fourth time on one tour. So perhaps, particularly in my professional life, I too am a secret music addict.
“this Is the history of an obsession...It is the shocking personal revelations of a secret music addict and consequently quite unfit for publication”
Why is that? Why should a personal reflection be any less worthy than that of a professional critic? Why should Simona’s (or indeed any fan’s) opinion on Vaughan Williams’s music, especially when articulated with eloquence, insight and clearly informed by research, be of any less interest to others? Clearly some publishers felt so, as they rejected it for not quite being a professional critique, whilst also not quite remaining as amateur enthusiasm.
Simona grew up between the wars, and gives a fascinating account of the absence of music in her childhood, something that seems anathema to me. The few who showed aptitude for playing were nurtured - even hot-housed - but for the rest musical education was just half an hour a week of musical appreciation. And singing - choir practice and singing classes that "provided us with the one vital musical experience of our lives", which then disappeared when she left school.
There is something about communal singing that is immensely uplifting, even if you struggle to hold a tune. School friends and I still remember music lessons where our teacher would simply get us singing week in week out – and always the same song: Sloop John B. Just before Christmas I went to one of the traditional Sheffield pub carol singing evenings, which probably have higher attendance figures than most church carol services. But it appears Simona's generation had a gaping musical void - moving into adulthood with little access to music, including singing, in any great variety.
We forget how fortunate we are to be able to listen to anything we want at any time at a click of a mouse. Even when I first started my own musical obsessions, I had several radio stations to choose between and the ability to tape my favourites from the top 40 on a Sunday evening. As I read this book and read Simona's thoughts on Vaughan Williams's works I will be able to download each piece for a tiny fee, or to listen to a variety of performances of a single work on YouTube. Simona had to put far greater effort into exploring her new found love of the composer and travelled to hear concerts for very different reasons to me - because that was in many cases her only option.
Simona considers at length how music has the ability to be all consuming, to the point of distraction. She questions how many road accidents might be caused by people transfixed by music. This was the 1950s – some cars might have had radios, but it was long before we were permanently connected to our iPods and mobiles, which in 2010 the AA estimated cause 17 accidents per day. Was Simona prescient? It wasn't the inability of pedestrians to hear traffic, or looking at a screen instead of the road that she was talking about, of course, but the emotional impact of a piece of music, that might so absorb the listener that they become diverted from the road. At first I found that concept a little far-fetched, but then I realised that this had almost happened to me in 1998.
I had just collected my first brand new car, which I had bought with money I had inherited after my sister died earlier that year. I had planned to collect the car and take it on a drive around the Cotswolds on my route home, so I had grabbed a tape I hadn't heard for a while to play on the drive – one side Car, Button Cloth by The Lemonheads, the other Become What You Are by The Juliana Hatfield Three. As the JH3 album played, on came the band’s best known song, and previously my favourite track, My Sister. The lyrics had always summed up my relationship with my own sister, and undoubtedly many other sibling relationships, that combination of love and hate. And then it reached the final verse and the final refrain: “I miss my sister, I really miss her”. And I began crying, so much that I had to pull over. I’ve been unable to listen to the song since, but even writing these lyrics now bring that moment, that emotion, right back.
So yes, Simona was right music does have the power to produce violent reactions, whether that is my grief or Simona’s dizzying joy that she wanted to shout from the rooftops. The rest of the book is her ‘shouting from the rooftops to anybody who will listen’, aiming to persuade as many as possible to share in her delight. I will listen to the works chronologically as she writes, and hope that her writing, and Vaughan Williams’s music, inspires that same dizzying joy.