Listening to Bach in the pub

One of the strongest memories I have of my schooldays at my town grammar-school is of Wednesday mornings when the whole school (that was about 360 of us, plus staff) trooped through the adjoining graveyard to St Nicolas Church for service. At the time, in the mid 1960s I thought this was a drag, but endured it like a spoonful of cod-liver oil. I probably sniggered away with my pals as the music master, a quaintly-dressed cove we called Clem, was invited by the Head, an imposing figure in his gown, to play a piece on the organ. This would have been the first time I ever heard Bach.

In retrospect, Clem was not the most accomplished organist, not even on the staff, but he was the music master, this was his raison d’être and I can remember now the nerves in his voice as he introduced the piece, which across the mists of time, always seemed to be the magisterial Toccata and Fugue in D minor.

Bach has stayed quietly by my side since then. For years, quietly hidden, but from time to time tugging away at my musical memory and popping up with manifestations such as The Brandenburg Concertos, The Prelude from the Cello Suite No 1 and latterly and I must confess only latterly, St Matthew’s Passion.

I had bought the boxed set of CDs, plus a CDROM (!), libretto in German, English and French of Matthäus-Passion by the Collegium Vocale of Ghent, directed by Philippe Herreweghe published by Harmonia Mundi, years ago from a music shop in Lichfield, but it had lain unused since. It was now in fact Easter Monday, so only a day or so late by the church calendar, when I actually started to listen to it. From the beautiful chorus opening in 3:4 time in which woodwind and strings gently rock one into a state of meditation, I was absorbed and moved. For those of you not familiar with this masterpiece, it is a long listen at one sitting and naturally tells the story of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus through arias, recitative and choruses. Until listening to this, I had never thought how much like the human voice is the oboe and time after time, Bach gently rocks us with the interplay of voice and woodwind, piercing angelic voices uplifting our spirits to what can only be described as the sublime.

So, I thought, I’ll download this onto my i-Phone. Well, why not? Then I can listen to it on holiday, in the car etc. So, after an hour or so spent fiddling around, between the computer, the dreaded i-Tunes and the device, I finally had the piece in its entirety on my playlist, or something like that. However, it then took me another week before I worked out how to turn off Apple’s curse: the shuffle. For those of you unfamiliar with this mode, it seems to be designed for people with the attention span of a gnat, who have to mix up their listening with tracks randomly selected, so St Matthew’s Passion was treated like a list of tracks on a Dizee Rascal album. Anyway, eventually I found how to turn the stupid thing off and was able to listen uninterruptedly to the sections of the work as they were written and meant to be heard and, joy for a linguist, to be able to follow the German while looking at the libretto in English!

Then everyday necessities crept in and we decided to have a Chinese take-away for dinner, so I was dispatched to the pub, wherein sitteth said Chinese, ordered the meal, bought a pint while it was cooking and sat in the corner of the busy bar listening through the ear pieces on my i-Phone to the familiar tune of:

Erkenne mich, mein Hüter
Mein Hirte, nimm mich an!

shortly before Christ tells Peter that before the cocks crows, he will deny him thrice. I was in heaven, well……. almost. I did get a few funny looks however, but personally I couldn’t see what was odd about some old geezer sitting alone in the pub with a pint of Marston’s in front of him listening to music on his headphones with a smile on his face. Try it.