Karl Jenkins - The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace

Classical training

Listening to the radio I just heard 'Benedictus' from this choral and orchestral work, a beautiful short piece with a simple and yet hypnotic melodic line repeated by violin and chorus.

I have always liked 'pretty' classical music, Vaughan Williams my favourite and with his 'Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis' being a colossal element in my listening life. I could move from Hendrix to this in an instant and be blown away by both, and have done so for over 40 years. I know the Williams is a constant play on Classic FM and is easily digestible by the masses, but so is Hendrix on Planet Rock and neither is diminished by its accessibility and/or familiarity.

My earliest listening to classical music occurred alongside that of rock. I dallied with Bartok and Stravinsky to complement my affinity for the experimental, as I did jazz and especially loads of Coltrane from the age of 16. But I soon discovered Williams and collected as much of his as I could then. Imagine my great pleasure this December to discover for the first time his 'Fantasia on Christmas Carols', a pristine vinyl copy for 50p in a charity shop.

In the 5th year at my secondary modern school we had our own little common room and a small group of us musical elite [we thought we were so cool!] would sit and listen to our recent rock and progressive albums on a small record player whilst others listened to their pop music on the radio. I recall Black Sabbath's first and Manfred Mann's Chapter Three blaring out at full volume, our mutual headbanging or still and earnest contemplations of teenage intellectual reverie. I'd bought the Sabbath at Portobello Market in London. I remember first listening to this communally at a friend's house and our all being amazed by its haunting rain and guitar and lyrics - this process of sharing being so important. I also remember getting the House Mistress to play 'Mister You're A Better Man Than I' from that Manfred Mann for an assembly and then her discussing the lyrics for the gathered to ponder on. Wow! I thought she and the House Master [yes, it was a secondary modern, but with pretensions] were old farts, but as I look back, especially as a teacher myself, I realise how understanding, supportive and tolerant they actually were. Their offices were next to our common room and they never told us to turn the music down, and they must have hated it. For example, 'Konekuf' - again from MMCT - with its wailing demented saxophone!

This seems a significant tangent from discussing classical music. It was whilst in that 5th form one of our teachers picked up on our incipient if loud love of music and offered to take us to a school-trip concert in London. We went to the Royal Festival Hall and saw the National Youth Orchestra. They must have played a variety of pieces, but I recall distinctly Respighi's 'Fontane di Roma' which is I believe one of the largest instrumental scores for an orchestra - and it was absolutely fucking amazing - played loud and live - and I knew then that it was all about the quality of the music itself and the playing and the location and the time it was heard and the emotions felt and so on and so on that mattered, not the genre or whether it 'fit' with some perceived group to which you felt you belonged.

I do wish I had realised this before I got rid of my soul albums in those early years thinking my affinity had to be exclusively with heavy rock!