Bob
Briggs - Musicweb reviewer
1954 - 2011
A
tribute
|
BOB BRIGGS
I
was born in Bradford, England, in 1954
into an unmusicial family, was almost
immediately adopted into an equally
unmusical family and was raised in Keighley,
a town of 60,000 inhabitants on the
side of the Pennines. My earliest musical
memories are of the BBC Light Programme
playing at home as my mother worked
– Gilbert and Sullivan, Tchaikovsky’s
1812 Overture, and the many and various
light pieces which filled the station
schedule – Robert Farnon, Frederic Curzon,
Eric Coates and so many more. When I
was 11 years of age I went to the local
grammar school and had my musical epiphany.
One music lesson (together with 29 unruly
boys who couldn't have cared less about
classical music) our teacher didn’t
want to teach us so he simply turned
on the radio and told us to listen to
the Eroica Symphony which was about
to be played. It is certain that those
29 unruly boys were grateful to leave
the room afterwards, but I wanted more
and, here’s one which needs further
examination, the following weekend I
went to the local music shop in town,
bought a 12-stave manuscript book and
filled all 64 pages with a Violin Concerto.
I don’t know how I did it but I did,
and I followed this with Symphonies,
Concertos, Suites, piano works, choral
works. Hats off, gentlemen, a Prodigy!!
Not so, I’m afraid. What I did know
was that I could read a score and I
knew what I was writing but it was rubbish,
of course – I wrote chords for a single
clarinet for, at that time, I knew nothing
about the capabilities of instruments.
However, with help and encouragement
from Brian Payne, my music teacher,
I started reading scores and learning
about orchestration and instrumentation
and finding out what was and wasn’t
possible. I also started taking cello
lessons, which was wasted on me as I
have never had sufficient patience to
sit down, alone, and practice – but
I always had time to sit alone and write
music.
In 1967 I started attending
the Hallé Orchestra subscription
concerts at Bradford’s St George’s Hall
and was lucky enough to hear John Barbirolli’s
last four seasons with the orchestra.
I have always felt myself to have been
privileged to have met Barbirolli a
few times and he was very kind to this
eager schoolboy.
When I was 17 I went to Huddersfield Technical
College, and, subsequently, Huddersfield Polytechnic (as it then
was) where I had the great good fortune to study composition (and
so much else) with the great Harold Truscott, to whom I owe almost
everything musical in my life. He opened my ears to so many musical
things and was the catalyst for my continuing interest in literature.
After studies I gave
many concerts as a singer, specialising
in English music of the 20th
century, and continued writing, gaining
performances in this country and the
USA and Australia and being commissioned
from the Bromsgrove Festival (my proper
6th Symphony), the USA and
Iceland! At a concert of my music in
London in about 1982 Roger Wright played
a piano piece of mine.
At 25 I gave up writing
music – I realized that my work simply
wasn’t good enough and I was never going
to set the Thames on fire with my genius
– and started writing about music –
for Records and Recording, the very
short lived Classical Sounds, sleeve
notes for LPs and the odd programme
book for concerts.
It now seems incredible
that I have been listening to music,
and been involved with it in one way
and another, for over forty years. And
I am still a very young man! For the
past twenty years I have been selling
books on the Southbank Book Market,
which is situated under Waterloo Bridge,
outside the National Film Theatre (or,
as it is now known, the BFI on the Southbank)
on the south bank of the Thames, and
because of this I have done various
BBC TV and Radio spots talking about
books. In 2002/2003 I wrote and presented
52 two-hour radio programmes concerned
with the byways of music in the first
50 years of the 20th century.
The byways were such that if there wasn’t
a recording of a certain work in my
own collection then it simply didn’t
exist! Talk about a personal view.
I don’t have favourite
composers or writers, but there are
certain artists whose work I couldn’t
live without – Haydn, Carl Nielsen,
Korngold, Weill, Peter Sculthorpe, Debussy,
Grainger, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young,
English composers of the Elgar/Delius/Bax/Tippett
generation, Harry Warren, Billy Mayerl,
The Who, The Rolling Stones (up to and
including the Sticky Fingers album and
their latest CD), much 60s pop, Christopher
Isherwood, Ed McBain, Philip K Dick.
My Desert Island pieces of music are
Korngold’s magnificent Symphony, Debussy’s
inimitable Des pas sur la niege (one
of the most perfect works of music I
know), Delius Brigg Fair, Haydn Symphony
No.48 in the Max Goberman recording
(just thrill to those high horns!),
Weill Dreigroschenoper (in the Frankfurt
Opera recording on Fontana, where the
soloists scream the songs at you in
a very Brechtian way), Schubert String
Quartet in A minor, D804, Frank Bridge
Enter Spring and Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony
for the counterpoint at the end.
I was given the part
of bookseller in the 2006 film Harry
Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,
but Warner Brothers scrapped the scene
two days before filming on the grounds
that it was too expensive! I have been
a committed lifelong Marxist as I consider
Groucho, Harpo and Chico to be three
of the funniest men who ever lived.
Since 1972 I have shaved seven times
and "enjoyed" six haircuts.
I lived in St Tropez in 1984, where
I worked as a chef in a bistro. I now
live alone in east London as my daughter
has gone to university. My son recently
had his first book of short stories
published by Sixties Press.
I love cooking and
hate gardening. My two most secret secrets
are that I have a desire to be a stand-up
comedian and I fear baldness. Now they’re
no longer secrets so I shall have to
find some more.
As a wise old man once said, "ahbudee...ahbudee,
ahbudeeuh…that's all folks!"