1964-5 My first year at the RAM with Harvey (2) -meeting Eric Fenby OBE

By far the most significant impact made upon Harvey during his 2 years at the RAM, and beyond – in both body and soul – was his relationship to his teacher of Theory & Harmony, Eric Fenby OBE. 

If my last diary entry was about practical matters and performance techniques, today’s thoughts are more about theories and ideas

(Eric Fenby as I remember him in 1964)

Although I never met Eric Fenby in person, I have become profoundly aware of his influence upon my young owner. Fenby, you will recall, was Frederick Delius’s amanuensis from 1928-34, and so, through my vivid connection with Halfdan Jebe, Delius’s great Norwegian friend, I DO have a tangible link!  What a coincidence, to find my Harvey sitting at the feet of the remarkable man who transferred Delius’s music from the sick and paralysed composer’s head onto the printed score ready for performance!

(Eric Fenby’s handwriting of a dictated Delius score)

Fenby’s one-to-one conversations with Harvey during Harmony lessons have stayed with me over the years (in a kind of transference), as Harvey has wrestled with, and explored the possible connections between the writing down and the interpretation of musical notation.  When we come to Harvey’s time of theological studies in Birmingham in the early 1970s, I shall be pondering all this alongside the interpretation and hermeneutical preaching in New Testament Gospel texts, with resonances of biblical criticism, of Friederich Schleiermacher and Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rudolf Bultmann from the past.

(A ‘Still’ from the film ‘A Song of Summer)’

During this first RAM year, Ken Russell was producing ‘A Song of Summer’, a BBC ‘Omnibus’ film depicting the experiences of Eric Fenby with the blind & paralysed Delius, based on Eric’s book ‘Delius as I knew him’.  It brought to the fore the enormous significance of being in the flesh with Eric Fenby, who, only 30 years previously had been nursing the dying body of Frederick Delius while extracting beautiful music from his broken syphyllic frame.

More of this remarkable mystery – later.

As Harvey’s time at the RAM moved through his first year, I sensed that he was beginning to lose something of the passion and sparkle in his handling and playing of me, and becoming drawn more towards theoretical matters, and towards thoughts of orchestral Conducting, which of course has such a personality ‘allure’. 

I know Eric Fenby once said to Harvey: ‘If you want to be a conductor, you have to become a philosopher first!’   

Was Harvey ‘conflicted’ as he experienced the huge difference between violin playing demands and the exciting broader questions of musicality?  Between one teacher who rarely affirmed him, and another who regularly praised him