1969  The year of change – who’s calling? God or Music? Or Both?

Our wonderful visit to Austria was a prelude to a time of dramatic change for Harvey – and consequently for me, too.

We can now see how Christmas & New Year in Vienna opened up pathways leading to a decisive cross-road for my young player. (One reader of this diary has already witnessed a ‘resurrection’).

The generous, selfless and kind hospitality shown by a German family in Vienna who had been forcibly exiled from their Sudeten homeland at the end of WW2, made a lasting and emotional impression upon Harvey’s body; and of course that also resonated in me.

(Expulsion of Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia 1945)

Back in Brighton, this experience of unbounded love made Harvey ever more restless at the bank, and he started to look for other forms of employment.  He went for an interview with BBC Radio 3 in London – without success, perhaps inevitably!  Also, it’s worth noting that ever since joining the bank in 1966, he had been taking the customary Institute of Banking exams, and failing at each attempt.

Then, one Sunday in the Spring of 1969, on the way home in the car from worship at Dorset Gardens Methodist Church, he hesitatingly whispered to his parents: ‘I think I want to be a Methodist minister.’

They were stunned – ‘failure at the RAM, failure at the bank, and now the Church!’ Even the distinguished Revd Dr Leslie Newman told him – ‘Harvey, you don’t have the gifts and graces for the ministry, and Methodism is dying anyway!’

Interestingly, in all this turmoil, I was sensitive to a new sonic flux that had been created in my young player – a kind of fluid energy, flowing through his body as we played, enabling him to move forward.  It could be described as a ‘vocation’, a voice, a sonic experience, calling out from within him.

When the resident minister, the Revd Frank Thewlis, became aware of this ‘calling’, he too began to sound forth and resonate delight and encouragement, for others to hear.

Brighton Public Library

Now, everything changed. Harvey began a new job as a library assistant at Brighton Public Library, leaving the bank behind, studying for preliminary exams for the church, passing all the required tests for acceptance as a student for the ordained ministry of the Methodist Church.

There seemed to be no ‘Failures’ any more.  Was this a kind of ‘Resurrection’?

However, I noticed one thing that profoundly troubled my musical sensibilities in this new theological excitement.  Harvey decided to give away all his vinyl records, and all his copies of miniature scores of great compositions.  I was hoping he wasn’t ritually eliminating and silencing his musical calling, replacing it with a theological vocation.

Music vs Theology; not Music with Theology.

‘A Failed conductor becoming an acceptable preacher?’ – this question has never left me.