Music

Music has been of vital importance to me for over a quarter of a century. Utterly talentless as a performer, my musical experiences have always been those of a listener. Like many teenagers, I pretty much defined who I was by the music I listened to, and the intensity of my emotional involvement with music at that time reflected the stormy passions of adolescence. Although the first record I owned was a recording of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" (Ernest Ansermet and l'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande on Decca), in my pre-University years the bulk of my enthusiasm was for the pop and rock music of the day (late '60s, early '70s) which still retains a special appeal for me. In particular I formed a deep appreciation of the band Procol Harum and it would be fair to say that for almost thirty years now they've remained my favourite band.

As the grey hairs have gathered, and as pop music pursues an ever-younger age-group, the hectic world of the charts has become pretty much irrelevant. Looking at my record collection now, you would find a roughly equal balance between classical music and the rock music of the '60s, '70s, and '80s with a smattering of folk music and instrumental electronic synthesiser music (from the time, more than twenty years ago now, before "new age" sucked all vitality from that form). In recent years I've also enjoyed a number of artists from that corner of the alternative music scene dominated by female vocals which is best summed up by the term "ectophilic", the best resource for investigating which is undoubtedly the Ectophiles' Guide to Good Music.

The definitive Ectophilic artist is, of course, the wonderful Happy Rhodes herself, for whom I have a special affection not only because is Happy an outstanding songwriter and vocalist whose music deserves to be far more widely known and appreciated but also because it was through my interest in Happy's music that I came to meet the woman who is now my wife, Lisa. For that (as well as for your superb music) I thank you, Happy, from the bottom of my heart!

In spite of being fairly keen gig-goers in our younger years, live concerts have been something of a rarity for Lisa & I recently. In 1999 we made an effort to see Lisa's all-time favourite singer James Taylor at the Royal Albert Hall when he visited London, and last year we enjoyed a performance of Laurie Anderson's Songs & Stories from Moby Dick at the Barbican in May and June Tabor's November date in the Purcell Room.

On the classical side of things, I was for many years a frequent concert-goer. London enjoys the greatest selection of high quality classical music performance of any city and I used to get to an average of two performances a week. I was in particular a fan of the Philharmonia and London Symphony Orchestras, the London Mozart Players (in their Jane Glover days), and the extraordinary percussionist Evelyn Glennie, not to mention the excellent local Harlow Chorus. I was also a regular at the English Nationa Opera.

More recently financial constraints have meant that we largely confine ourselves to a selction of the many delights provided annually by the BBC at its series of Henry Wood Promenade Concerts, more familiarly known as the Proms. My wife refers to these as the "classical music olympics" and they must be the greatest classical music festival in world, offering an unrivalled mixture of established repertoire and new commissions played by world-class artists in a feast of music making every night from the middle of July to the middle of Setember.

We attend several of each season's Proms at the Royal Albert Hall in person (often including the world-famous "Last Night") and listen to many more of them on BBC Radio 3. I've written up some thoughts on each of the concerts we attend in person.

At the request of a friend of my wife's, I've put together some suggestions that I hope will be of use to those interested in getting into classical music but who may be daunted by the prospect of diving into such a huge, complex, and unfamiliar subject.