On a Light Hearted Note

Learning the violin

Only the most sadistic child would insist on learning the violin, but encourage them lest they fulfil the sadly unexploited musical promise of Uncle Joe, who was a whizz on the recorder. Violins are £70, bows £14.50. Music stands are £9.99, beginner’s music books £3.95 and a teacher to explain them £23 an hour. Making your prodigy practise will cost you blood (yours, metaphorically), sweat (theirs) and tears (everyone’s) but will be easier if you wear some £1.99 ear plugs, particularly during the hours of scale practice, which will poison domestic harmony quicker than a teenager. Family therapy (£150) might help you all come to terms with your newly discordant existence but, realistically. the only solution is to call a halt to this ill-advised £323.43 stringed-instrument experiment, plug the merits of the flute and tell your thwarted little Menuhin that Uncle Joe would never have amounted to much anyway and was probably far happier as a plumber.

Hilary Rose (from the Times 25th January 2003)

The Choirmaster

The Choirmaster stood at the Pearly Gates
His face was worn and old
He stood before the man of fate
For admission to the fold.

'What have you done,' St. Peter said
'To gain admission here?'
'I've been a Choirmaster, Sir,' he said
'For many and many a year.'

The Pearly Gates flew open wide,
St. Peter touched the bell:
'Come in,' he said, 'and choose your harp,
You've had your share of hell!'

If I was Tony Blair's adviser, I'd tell him to take up the piano. What someone in his aloof position needs is swiftly bringing down to size, which is what happened to me last week when I attempted my grade one piano exam. Nothing has reduced me to a gibbering bag of nerves more than the 10 minutes I spent trying to play the piano in front of an examiner without making it sound like a Roman execution. I've never felt less like a grown-up in my life, and that includes that part of my life when I was a child.

I've made speeches, bought a house, been asked to write for a national newspaper and driven a car into things, but none of this adult experience mattered when I walked into a strange room, sat down at a strange piano and played what in the end turned out to be completely strange music.

The reason the music was strange was because, for some reason, my hands had been suddenly replaced by two packets of fish fingers, neither of which could be controlled by signals from the brain. Sounds came out that have never been categorised before. Imagine the noise an emperor penguin would make if it fell into a piano. Then treble it. Now have the whole thing detonated in a controlled explosion. That's still not as bad as the sound I was making. A Shetland pony could have played better.

At the end of perhaps the longest 10 minutes of my life, during which I decided I hated all instruments and all music, I did make a salutary discovery. Which is that all of us, especially those of us who have a particularly high regard for ourselves (for example, Tony Blair), would benefit from being thrown into a short, relatively trivial but deeply embarrassing situation over which we have no control and throughout which we are mercilessly judged.

(by Heisler/Goldrich or Bob the Organist depending on who you believe)

It's awful being an alto when you're singing in the choir,
Sopranos get the twiddly bits that people all admire,
The basses boom like big trombones, the tenors shout with glee,
The alto part is on two notes, or if you're lucky, three.
 
And when we sing an anthem and lift our hearts in praises,
The men get all the juicy bits and telling little phrases.
Of course, the trebles sing the tune - they always come off best -
While altos only get three notes and twenty-two bars rest.
 
It doesn't matter what we sing, from hymnbooks or from psalter,
The choirmaster looks at us - our voices start to falter;
Too high! Too low! Too fast! Too slow! You hold that note too long!
It doesn't matter what we do, it's certain to be wrong.
 
Oh! shed a tear for altos: they're the Marthas and they know
In ranks of choral singers they're considered very low.
They are so very humble that a lot of folk forget 'em:
They'd love to be sopranos, but their vocal chords won't let 'em.
 
And when the final trumpet sounds and we are wafted higher,
Sopranos, tenors, basses, all will form the heavenly choir.
When they sing Alleluias to celestial flats and sharps,
We altos in the corner will be polishing our harps.