1970 onwards – Audible Cheesecake or Sonic Wallpaper?

With this new-found energy and excitement for Harvey, I became acutely aware that we were hardly ever playing anymore.  Records and scores had been thrown away, and I was left alone – books and reading filled his mind and body.

Harvey became hungry for knowledge, and his studies at Theological College were all-absorbing.  His being registered for a degree course at Birmingham University thrilled him, and the desire for graduate status overtook him.  It felt as though the quest for knowledge and understanding (and God, perhaps?) depended wholly on academic and intellectual achievement.

I find this attitude towards Theology and matters of ultimate concern (so commonly held) goes against the grain in my very frame and body. Knowledge and understanding surely come from the wonders of playing, hearing and tasting the beauties of sound and the aesthetic senses in our bodies, not through mere book learning and academic achievement!

Harvey has begun to realise this now, but in 1970 he had a long way to go.

Then, I desperately wanted to show him how the profound truths explored by theologians like Friederich Schleiermacher, Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer – and even Friederich Nietzsche – had been inherited by me, and grafted into in my body over these past years, and were somehow best expressed when ‘played’, ‘performed’ and ‘practised’.

(Friedrich Schleiermacher)

I got a glimmer of hope when Harvey occasionally tried to draw on his experiences with Eric Fenby at the RAM.  He was beginning to think that the text of the Bible could be compared to a collection of original musical manuscripts, and maybe Fenby’s work with Frederick Delius could usefully support and even enlighten this idea.

(Depiction of composer Delius with amanuensis Fenby)

With Harvey’s intense interest in Biblical studies, he was beginning to see his preaching preparation as something similar to the work done by a musician preparing for a performance.  All the insights he found from Fenby’s amanuensis experiences served as helpful expressions of this thought.

Could the Church’s preaching from a TEXT of the Bible be more of a PERFORMANCE and less of an intellectual exercise, just as a musician’s interpretation of the musical SCORE or MANUSCRIPT comes to fruition more in PERFORMANCE than in detailed accuracy?

Although Harvey, in these university and ministerial training days, was being drawn more and more into the importance of study and academic pursuits, this PRACTICAL performance awareness was constantly at play in the background of his being.  He hardly ever played me now.  Perhaps his natural reticence reflected (and resonated with) the popular assumption that academic excellence is more important than aesthetic expression and appreciation.

Throughout the remainder of our lives together, Harvey found only a very few friends along the way who shared these feelings.  For most, music, at best, is a useful metaphor or illustration – nothing more. Karl Popper described music as ‘audible cheesecake’; for many others, ‘sonic wallpaper’!