The H Factor

Don’t Stop The Music - Rihanna, Good Girl Gone Bad

The philosopher Nietzche once said, “Without music, life would be a mistake”.  Hmm.  Clearly our existentialist friend never had to sit through a school concert.

The obsession of British schools for music lessons has always baffled me – I’m sure there is some deeply fascinating study somewhere that demonstrates how squeaking out a round of London’s Burning on the descant recorder improves co-ordination and concentration, as well as giving all the class dullards a chance to make up for their academic shortfalls,  but still.  What’s wrong with sticking them in the corner with a big pile of fuzzy felt and fishy glue?  It’s safer than letting them run amok with a glockenspiel.

I learned the clarinet at school, mainly because I had a giant crush on the teacher, who looked a bit like David Essex in a raffish, down-the-fairground kind of way.  I was deeply rubbish, but mainly because I was too busy admiring his leather waistcoat to learn to read music properly.  I paid the price when the school concert came round – I was informed that my rendition of the theme to The Pink Panther had failed to reach the required standard for performance in front of parents, and I would not be taking part.  Crushed, I tell you.

Anyway, these days it’s not terribly fashionable to wreck the performance ambitions of small children, in much the same way that there are no longer winners or losers on sports day, and no-one has to run in their pants and vest any more if they forget their PE kit.  Like a bit of playground humiliation ever scarred anyone for life, tsk.  So when the 10-year-old daughter asked me to witness her singing a solo at the school concert, I had a very bad feeling that it was going to be bloody awful.

And do you know what?  I couldn’t, in my wildest dreams, have even BEGUN to imagine how horrendous it would be.  The daughter wasn’t due to sing until the last five minutes - for the 115 torturous minutes prior to that, I had to sit through a cacophony of musical horror beyond my wildest imagination.  It seemed that all it took to get a slot on stage was to say “is that a guitar, miss?” as you passed through the music room.  “Yes it is, Oliver – would you like to play a Spanish flamenco on it in the school concert on Thursday?”  “But I don’t know how to play the guitar, miss”. “Oh, don’t worry about that, dear - just strum away for a few minutes, it’s all about taking part”.

It started out with about fifteen piano performances, mainly random plinky-plonky fisting of the keyboard until a very little girl got up and nailed a section of a Schumann concerto and forced us to all take our fingers out of our ears for a couple of minutes.   Then we were subjected to twenty minutes of woodwind, including a child who (I swear to god), played six notes on the saxophone and then sat down.  Bonkers flamenco guitar followed, and then it was time for the harpsicle.

And, what the fuck, pray, is a harpsicle? I hear you cry.  Well, quite.  It’s a small plastic harp, I discovered, for the purpose of allowing children to play the harp (every child’s dream, let’s face it) without the school having to invest in an actual proper harp, which can be a bit of an arse to take home to practise.  It seems that the recorder’s days are numbered, because it didn’t even get a look in at this concert, despite the harpsicle delivering little more than the `boink’ noise you get when you ping a ruler on your little brother’s arm.  I found myself contemplating whether London’s Burning would work in harpsicle form, which was a happy distraction from all the inharmonious plinky twanging .

Several hours/years later, I was distracted from staunching the blood flowing from my ears by the (clearly deaf) music teacher announcing that next up was a girl called Sarah, who “has only being playing the violin for three weeks”.

As introductions go, this one is up there with “Dr Shipman will see you now”.  At one point the dad sitting next to me leaned over to whisper “I’m in hell. You?”, which set me off into a paroxysm of stifled giggles that carried on throughout Sarah’s Sonata To Strangled Cats and into The Ninth Circle of Cello Hell.

I’m proud to report, however, that Britain’s Got Talent mentality kicked in fairly early on – the musically gifted (both of them) got polite applause from the audience, whilst the truly dreadful were subjected to cheers and whooping of support.  Except every time we thought we’d hit the bottom of this particular talent void, another small child would pop up with an oboe and lower the standard even further.  My hands were red raw by the end – who knew that supporting the underdog could be such hard work?

Although the daughter sang like an angel, obviously.  No, really.