moseleymoles on Music and your parents
There you go.
My brother put a large plastic crate on the front room floor, containing about a hundred CDs. The process of clearing out my parents’ house ground endlessly on, as we worked through almost sixty years of books, papers, clothes, china…my dad in particular grew up in a small terraced house during the war and the rationing after. Part of the great post-war leap in social mobility, he and mum bought a large Elizabethan house in the middle of the Peak District and that was where they stayed for the next sixty years. They never threw anything away, and had enough tinned tomatoes stored up to last me out as well as them.
By the time I could talk to dad about music his taste was strictly classical and jazz. He would chunter at the kitchen table as I did my homework to cassettes of The Police or The Jam. Truth be told one of my earliest memories at the end of the sixties, in our previous house, involves his music taste. I can remember crawling under his enormous Grundtvig stereo system mounted coffin style in a large wooden cabinet, and getting an electric shock as I poked around under it. Around this time I also, it was related to me, enjoyed an afternoon of unsupervised surfing across our polished wooden floor using his finest sixties rock vinyl – Blonde on Blonde, Pepper etc. – as my surfboard. I still have his copy of The White Album (poster and 3 of the 4 photos) which escaped the destruction, and when our own children had scrambled our brains and our living space, traded his first pressing of Surrealistic Pillow to Record and Tape Exchange as part of a job lot for which we got £1 each. The horror, the horror…
The surfing incident appears to have ended his interest in rock, and the music he listened to when I grew up was classical. He professed a love of jazz – especially Bix Biederbecke – and would listen to it on the radio. Him and mum (though always his choices) were frequent classical concert goers and very occasionally I’d be home and troop along to events like the Cello Festival at the Royal Northern College Music.
For the last twenty years or so of his life he would have Radio 3 on in the kitchen whenever I went home, played through a Bang and Olufsen Beosound which also had a CD player which I never saw him use. The enormous Grundtvig coffin was disposed of.
There’s a point in your relationship with your parents where you realise rooms are not used from one visit to the next. So it was with the CDs, which were stored in his study. I occasionally took away a CD to listen to and rip from a collection that didn’t seem to ever change position or show signs of usage.
Their book library (again 95% my dad’s) was so large – as to be fair he was an academic – that over the last five years before his death myself and my brother would smuggle out a crate at a time. His eyesight had deteriorated to such an extent after decades with glaucoma, that he could never read for longer than a newspaper article. The Kindle my brother had bought him he never took out of the drawer, despite my brother’s efforts to show him how large the font could be. Almost until his death we’d talk about the books we’d read: particularly American novelists of which he was a huge fan – McCarthy, Delillo, Richard Ford and so on. He’d never however talk about the music he was listening to, so this is partly a dialogue with my dead dad about that box of CDs.
The CDs stayed where they were in the study were until he died, and we’d settled my mum in a care home. Then they arrived courtesy of my brother. I thought for a second – maybe two – about just boxing them up and taking them to Oxfam wholesale. But as part of the many farewells to him I thought I owed him to listen to them. So a year later this is what I’ve found.
I should say that though we’d go to bookshops at Christmastime for many years in my teens and twenties I never went to a record shop or heard him talk about going to one. I suspect that this collection was amassed almost entirely through mail order. So, here’s my voyage round my father in a hundred CDs:
The gimmes
A complete box set of Mozart Piano Concertos (10 CDs), Beethoven Piano Sonatas and Piano Trios, Vivaldi sonatas for cello and harpsichord – these were obviously keepers which would fit seamlessly into my shelves. I’ve actually only just started listening to these – about 20 cds – saving them until last while I worked through the ones which were rip and charity, or just charity.
The best ofs of jazz
He loved Bix Biederbecke and Louis Armstrong most of all, but his small number of jazz CDs were chiefly best ofs by Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young, Ella Fitzgerald, I suspect collected via mail order from possibly The Sunday Times as they are all in a uniform edition. Nothing that much I’d not heard before here.
O! Those Russians
Almost all the CDs that made it from the maybe to the keep pile were Russian:
Tchaikovsky, the Shostakovich string quartets (7 CDs marvellous), Gliere, Cello Concertos by Miakovsky and Kabalevsky etc. Many completely new to me or in the case of Shostakovich a new set of pieces. Gliere’s Symphony No 3 (Ilya Muromets) may be the best monumental symphony you’re never heard. Along with this was the singular Alan Hovhaness, an unclassifiable American composer whose Symphony 22 is one of 67! The fact that many of these CDs were Cello Concertos fitted in with his love of this instrument. He would regularly drag my mother (and once me) to the bi-annual International Cello Festival at the Royal Northern College of Music for evenings of 100% cello action, sadly now defunct it seems.
English minors
Putting Radio 3 and his collection of minor English composers – Rawsthrone, Arthur Sullivan, Bantock, Finzi, Bax and Stanford – together, I think he heard these pieces featured on Composer of the Week. Many are still in their clear plastic wrap confirming these were never played. Having listened to them they didn’t do much for me.
Lieder
Schubert, Liszt, Schumann – I’m digging these quite a bit, the most accessible really do sound like pop songs of the nineteenth century. Great in the car. I would listen to 4 or 5 at time on the way to work, before switching over to XTC or Weller.
Baroque
Several CDs of unaccompanied harpsichord by composers such as Rameau. Not a fan of this type of music at all. There’s a reason the piano took off.
Opera
As a buff of both theatre and classical music no surprise that he loved opera. He went to Covent Garden in the fifties and sixties, and regularly to Opera North and other companies who came to Manchester. Living near Buxton he and mum were annual visitors to the opera festival there which started by digging up obscurities not in the standard repertoire. There’s three CDs of soprano greatest hits – Tebaldi, Sutherland and Callas – and, joy, a complete Callas recording of Lucia Di Lammermoor, one of the few operas that I can listen to on CD.
I’m glad they didn’t go to Oxfam unlistened to. Very few showed any signs of being played, and really it seemed to be much more about hearing a piece he liked on Radio 3 and ordering it as an archivist, then playing it. Really his collecting and playing years were that giant Grundtvig coffin stereo, complete with reel-to-reel and enormous floorstanding KEF speakers. I remember he had a vinyl box set of the Bach unaccompanied cello suites played by Tortelier – that vinyl cover I found on discogs and used is deeply Proustian. We played the prelude to the first suite at his funeral.
That’s a touching tribute to your father, your memories with and of him.
60 years of stuff – I can just imagine. My father died a year and a half ago. He was a terri(fic/ble) hoarder, but because he deteriorated alarmingly through Parkinsons, in his final years, my sister and I were able to throw things away even while he was still (somehow) there – things he would never have allowed to be disposed of if he had the power.
I found the tins of tomatoes and the unused CD player, rooms, Kindle particularly moving. Growing up, our parents are like Gods – to meditate on their passions, their idiosyncracies and frailties is humane, it seems to render them human.
Nicely done.
By the way, I think the German company might be Grundig – we had one of their ugly brown box TVs when we lived in Switzerland in the 80s. It took ages to glow into life and there always seemed to be a thick layer of static electricity swabbed over the whole screen.
Not sure why I invented the bizarre spelling of Grundvig and thanks for your kind words. I’m not sure which is harder, to start the clear-out while they are still alive, in the knowledge they will never ever use these things or even enter this room again, or to leave it all until they’ve died.
My brother was much more brutal than me (and as Ms Moles is an only child it’s much easier I can definitely say with a sibling to chew things over with) hence him dumping all the CDs.
Lovely tribute to your dad.
That’s a lovely piece of writing and glimpse into your father’s life.
Other than a bunch of old photos I only took some bound-up sheet music of a couple of pieces that my dad used to play on his double bass (when he still could play – the arthritis made it too painful during the last year of his life).
One contains his very favourite pieces and is falling apart from being used over and over again for decades; it’s Bach’s Suites for cello, transcribed for double bass.
The other one is in good shape, has a beautiful cover and is for a piece of music and composer I’ve never heard of – Franz Anton Hoffmeister’s Solo quartett No. 2 – but it’s signed by my dad on the title page, and has a notation saying that it was recorded by him and three other named musicians (one of them was one of his best friends during my childhood) for the Swedish Radio in December 1969.
I haven’t yet tried to find a recording of this piece, but I will at some point, because I suspect that I will get a Proustian rush when I hear it, having heard him practice it for hours and days and weeks, no doubt.
But dad was not a hoarder, and he got rid of most of his stuff when he sold his flat to move to Hungary for a few years (third marriage). When he moved back to Sweden (wife died of brain tumor) he got a smaller flat, just bought the essentials and kept very few books and CDs. He didn’t like listening to recorded music, and he only kept a handful of books that he loved and re-read over and over (until his eye-sight was too bad).
He only kept enough food to last him a week, until the next delivery (by my sister) – he always cooked the same dishes (that’s how he knew what day it was…”What did I eat for lunch today? Aha – must be Wednesday!”)
Two of my sisters cleared out his flat and its attic storage space in two days, only keeping a couple of boxes of stuff for the family to rummage through; mostly sheet music, photos and clothes (he had an eye for stylish clothes of good quality, always well dressed and handsome).
But we had already received our most priced possessions to remember him by, many years before his departure; the CD reissue of the recording he was most proud of; another solo suite for double bass (by a Swedish composer). That’s the music I turn to when I want to feel close to him again.
Terrific writing.
Every time we visit my wife’s parents ( both approaching 90 and in reasonable health) I look around at the large house they have lived in for 50 years. Nothing gets thrown out, literally thousands of model cars, Motor Magazines going back to 1950, hundreds of plates and mugs brought back from every place they visited, album after album of family photographs, drawers of jewellery (no doubt some very expensive items hidden in there somewhere), enough pots and pans to furnish the kitchens of a small country, it’s endless.
I hope it’s a long way off yet but I can’t help but think “pity the poor bugger who has to clear this all out…oh.”
I have a mixed view of houses full of stuff. On the one hand it can be unhealthy to keep too much. Yet people’s houses are an expression of who they are – it’s their memories in physical form – touchpoints that can draw out recollections and reminiscences. While there is a burden ahead of you in disposing of lots of stuff, for now it is a living history of lives well lived.
The last time I was with my mum, while glad to have got cleared many rooms of the shared hoarding of her and my dad, she was somewhat regretful at getting rid of stuff that had memories – merely by being surrounded by it, I feel.
Absolutely – wouldn’t dare to move a thing in there, every single item they love and cherish. Just a pity about the poor bugger….
When my dad died and being an only child I had to clear his house out. I didn’t have a great deal of time as it was a council house. Id to enlist friends to give me a hand. In my old bedroom was a large metal lathe it took four people to carry it down, in the sitting room taking up about a third of the room was a floor loom.
I burst out laughing at one point, my friends wondered what it was about. I’d found a beehive in kit form in the wardrobe.
I got a house clearance chap to empty the house, he eventually had to concede defeat.
At least it took my mind off things, a few years back working as a registrar I looked up his death certificate I couldn’t remember signing it.
My dad died about 2 years before Brothers in Arms came out on CD. I inherited his extensive collection of classical box sets – Beethoven (Amadeus) and Shostakovich (Borodin) string quartets, Beethoven piano sonatas (Gilels), Mozart piano concertos (Brendel) and the like. I felt sentimental about them, but not enough to hang on to them once I got my first CD player. There used to be a classical record shop in Wardour St in Soho full of chinstrokers in duffle coats, and I moved them on there.
When we cleared out my parents-in-laws house none of their offspring wanted anything to do with the books, so I took the lot and paid £200 into the estate. Not a bad deal – I’ve still got a fair few, but the ones I sold brought in about £3000. First edition of Lucky Jim went for £600.
I am amazed you lived to tell this lovely tale.
My son at about 3 got out my Dylan bootlegs. I chased him round the house until he took a flying leap under the blankets to the safety of his slumbering mother.
Thanks for all your kind words everyone – dad died almost two years ago now, but whether it’s the son of one of his university colleagues seeing if dad had any writing about their time together (he did), or his nice folio society editions of Dickens and Eliot, he’s still around.
Lovely post Moles. Given his love of music and expensive hifi I reckon your Dad would have fitted right in here.
That Tortelier album looks great – fab cover and I’m sure the playing is sublime. I would guess your parents must have seen him play a number of times – he was a regular guest at the Halle, Royal Liverpool Phil and other British orchestras and must have played solo at the Royal Northern College of Music as well.
By the time my Dad died my parents’ relatively small record collection had long gone but I kept a handful of their books – thrillers by the like of Hammond Innes and Eric Ambler published in uniform hardback editions by one of this monthly mail order book clubs. It’s a small connection back to a very different time.