{"id":1163,"date":"2020-10-11T20:32:46","date_gmt":"2020-10-11T20:32:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=1163"},"modified":"2020-10-11T23:04:31","modified_gmt":"2020-10-11T23:04:31","slug":"sunday-11th-october-2020-day-209","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2020\/10\/11\/sunday-11th-october-2020-day-209\/","title":{"rendered":"Sunday, 11th October, 2020 [Day 209]"},"content":{"rendered":"

I set off early for the newspapers this morning with the expectation that I would be back in\u00a0<\/span>time for the\u00a0Andrew Marr<\/em> show which starts at 9.00 am. I give myself the treat to listening to some tracks of Bach and Mozart loaded years onto my (massively outdated) iPhone 4 which I just use nowadays as a type of MP3 player. As it happened, the first track was the cantata \u00a0‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring<\/em>‘ which was played on solo trumpet and organ – as such, it did remind me of my old and good friend Clive who played this on his trumpet at our 50th\u00a0wedding anniversary\u00a0celebrations three years ago. Sadly, Clive died earlier on this year, just before COVID-19 really hit us hard so I shed a silent tear in his\u00a0<\/span>memory.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

As I was on my own and in a reminiscent mood, I wondered when my interest in classical music was first aroused. It certainly was not the influence of my mother for\u00a0whoever I located and tried to play some classical music on the radio, I would invariably get ‘When are you going to turn that incessant row off?<\/em>‘ Our family dog did not appreciate my\u00a0attempts to practice on the violin because on one of the occasions I brought the\u00a0violin to practice at home, our mild mannered little dog threw her head right back and howled like a wild\u00a0prairie wolf. So I would have to thank the influential music teacher who taught me at Thoirnleigh College, Bolton where I\u00a0boarded for three years whilst my mother went off to train to be a teacher in the mid-1950’s. His name was ‘Jock’ McGovern and as a Catholic priest was\u00a0entirely untrained as a teacher.\u00a0<\/span>However, he had some interesting teaching styles and tricks. Each week we would have two music lessons -on of the first of these we would do the conventional elemts of musical education (staves, types of notes and so on) On the second lesson of each week, we were taught the life of a\u00a0great composer. We were told the story of the composer’s life\u00a0and then played some fragments of music that we would always associate with him e.g. ‘<\/span>Fingal’s Cave’<\/em> for Mendelssohn, ‘<\/span>Eine \u00a0Kleine Nachmusik<\/em>‘ for Mozart. Our\u00a0homework was always the same – from our rough note books we had to copy the story of the composer’s life into the lined pages on the left hand side of our ‘neat’ book whilst the\u00a0fragments of music were copied onto the musical staves on the right. And then we were asked to draw, with the\u00a0lightest of touches and using coloured crayons,a collage of scenes from the composer’s\u00a0life (e.g. The father and son on horseback in Schubert’s ‘<\/span>The\u00a0Erl King<\/em>‘ ) I have to tell you now\u00a0that as a 11-12 year old (boys) we absolutely hated doing this activity as it made us think we were being infantilised and treated like little primary school children. But – this is the\u00a0extraordinary thing. After over 60 years I can call to mind\u00a0almost every one of those stories, complete with\u00a0illustrations and, of course, the musical fragments that were completely lodged in my memory. All of this was done without the benefit of an ‘modern’ educational theory – ‘Jock’ just devised the system himself (I subsequently, though, read a tribute to him after he died a few years and other generations of school children has been equally inspired) I thought I was quite good at music always getting a mark of about 95%. Only\u00a0later did I discover that the lad who came bottom of the class got a mark of 92% and the top mark was 99%. By all thinking we had\u00a0got good marks, did that make us perform better? \u00a0What Jock was not was an effete, tender-skinned aesthete – quite the\u00a0reverse. He was a stocky, rough-and-tumble Glaswegian with a temper that was violent and effervescent – hence we both\u00a0respected and also feared him somewhat. The school was rife with stories of how Jock has chased a miscreant schoolboy all over the school yard striking him with a violin bow (or trying to) for some\u00a0misdemeanour. This I did not witness, but the following incident I did witness. The ‘runt’ of the class was a little lad whose (surname) was Harrison and who could never remember the difference between a sharp and a flat. In exasperation, Jock seized hold of Harrison who was facing away from one hand and with one hand under the base of his skull, raised young Harrison several feet off the floor, saying to hime ‘<\/span>Now,\u00a0Harrison, a sharp RAISES a note<\/em>‘ Then he released his fingers and when Harrison\u00a0crumpled to the floor, he shouted ‘<\/span>And a flat LOWERSs a note<\/em>‘ ( I surmise that Harrion never every forgot that distinction ever again) Jock had a 650cc\u00a0Norton motorbike and there was rumour that Jock\u00a0had killed an elderly pedestrian whilst driving at 80mph on Blackburn New Road. In the days when car indicators were a little pop-up sliver of plastic, Jock had a special pair of gloves that had a\u00a0metal contact between thumb and forefinger. Together with the batteries\u00a0stored inside the glove, the\u00a0motor cyclist could give a flashing indication of when they\u00a0were about to overtake by extending their arm and activating the light by repeating pressing and releasing\u00a0his fingers. We\u00a0are naturally intrigued by this (in 1957). To\u00a0<\/span>conclude, Jock once\u00a0gave the 40 boarders and 20 religious staff a 20 second lesson. ‘Well, we are going to try some Gregorian Chant this evening. You all know how staves work but this stave only has four lines, each note is a\u00a0crotchet, a dot doubles the length of the note and every note is a tone apart. Off you go!<\/em>‘ and so all 60 of us sang\u00a0Gregorian chant perfectly after the minimum of instruction. My only concluding comment is that somebody of this ilk would not survive for 2 weeks in a course of teacher\u00a0training and now he would be\u00a0thrown out after such a series of transgressions.But think of the generations of students that this man had inspired over the years – is there no room for the\u00a0unconventional in today’s educational system – I must ask the question!\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span>I attach a link to an obituary of this remarkable man:<\/span><\/p>\n

http:\/\/mch.iblogger.org\/jock.html<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I set off early for the newspapers this morning with the expectation that I would be back in\u00a0time for the\u00a0Andrew Marr show which starts at 9.00 am. I give myself the treat to listening to some tracks of Bach and Mozart loaded years onto my (massively outdated) iPhone 4 which I just use nowadays as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1163"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1168,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1163\/revisions\/1168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}