Life and my music, part nine...

SEACON YE SHALL FIND

Back when I was in exile, recording my bits and bobs off the radio and--oh yes, that's another thing. For a while there, in my youth, I would wake up quite early, and I used to have Radio Three on in my room, and after the last bits of the World Service (in Czech, I believe) and a minute of soft bips, they would play a piece of music, unannounced and unnamed. At first, it was a fairly forgettable bit of a symphony by someone named (I found out later) Boyce, but then one morning it changed.

This solo violin, completely unaccompanied, snaked sinuously into my ears--sinuously but not sinisterly, I should say, the snake metaphor isn't quite right but it's the best I can do--and wound around itself for a few moments, and then a soft string chord lit up the background as the violin continued to dance. It was a breathless moment of beauty, and the first time I heard it I was awake, all at once, and enraptured. A clarinet responded, against a background of flutes, and then the whole string section came alive like sunrise and reached up to a chord that left the single violin winding its way down from the height into its dance again, softly underpinned by a harp, like one dancer supporting another in a delicate pose. The violin reached up again, paused for a moment, and then the strings and woodwind began a pavane, stately and yet feather-light, the strings echoing the soloist's moves while flutes and oboes and clarinets kept the rhythm going. The chords, there was something strange about the chords, but I was too caught up in the moment. Slowly the volume and the light grew on me, and now the strings were reaching for the sky, and brass was coming on in strong chords pushing them higher, higher, and in one ecstatic blaze the violins leaped an octave and for a moment I saw heaven in my mind's eye.

There is absolutely no better way in this world to wake up on your own.

It took me a long time to find out that the piece was "The Song of Elihu and the Pavane Of The Sons Of The Morning," from Job: A Masque For Dancing, by Ralph Vaughan Williams. (You'll find it at 04:50 on this Youtube clip, in a very good version with fairly poor sound quality.)People kept listening to my incoherent descriptions and telling me it was The Lark Ascending, which is very nice, but, as Zathras said, not the one. Eventually I tracked it down, and then I found the Fantasia On A Theme By Thomas Tallis, and the symphonies (of course). His "London Symphony" was described in Sixteen Symphonies, but I'd never heard it and so hadn't read that bit. I never got on with Elgar too well, Holst I only knew because of The Planets, and Walton didn't grab me, but V-W and I just clicked right away.

Anyway, back to the story.

Back when I was in exile, New English Library had decided to do something radical and put out a science fiction magazine. It ended up being called Science Fiction Monthly, and it was something new to me, completely unlike the old Galaxies and Ifs I used to pick up from Woolworths in that blessed time when they were being used for transatlantic ballast or whatever the deal was. This was a big glossy almost-broadsheet, and most of its pages were poster-sized reproductions of book covers (NEL books, of course) with a few pages of text sprinkled in among. Thus I got to know the work of Bruce Pennington, Jim Burns, Peter Goodfellow and of course Chris "Two lumpy spaceships all right for you, boss?" Foss. And in among the text, which included some interesting stories and a good deal of fascinating sf history I hadn't known, it was mentioned that sf fans were in the habit of meeting once a month in a particular London pub.

When I got back to London, it was one of my goals to track down that pub. I'd read Arthur C Clarke's Tales From The White Hart, of course, and I knew that it had actually been a pub called the White Horse where the monthly gatherings used to take place, and SFM had let on that it was one called the Globe now, but I never did find that one. Hanging around at Dark They Were And Golden-Eyed, though, and the newly opened Forbidden Planet, I learned that it was all happening on the first Thursday of the month at the One Tun in Farringdon, just a hop, skip and a jump through Smithfield market from where I was working. So one Thursday I turned up. I didn't do pubs at that point (never have quite got the hang) so I was a touch trepidatious, but I swallowed hard, took a deep breath and stepped in.

A life-changing moment, if you like. A watershed. A turning point. I've told the story of what happened thereafter in a filksong called "Pork Pie," which despite the title is quite largely true, and it isn't as yet directly relevant to the theme of these articles, so I won't run through it again; but fandom, as I discovered it on that hot dry Thursday night, took me in and embraced me as a socket embraces a plug, with a hole for my every eccentrically-shaped pin. Considering that within a month I was being driven down to Brighton in a van with non-working windscreen wipers, to attend the World Science Fiction Convention with friends I'd met for the first time when I stepped across that threshold, I really was a lucky bugger, wasn't I?

More about music in part ten, coming soon to a mouse-click near you.