Living History
Last night, twenty-five string students aged eleven to eighteen rehearsed at the Langley Community Music School (LCMS) to perform at the launch of Quodlibet: A Year in Music, Ian Hampton’s and my new book, which is a musician’s diary, one entry for every day of the year. The piece they’ll play—Apotheosis from Apollon musagète by Stravinsky—is the recommended listening for the last entry in the book. Joel Stobbe, their conductor, read the entry to the students so that they could think about it while practising: “The year Jan was born, Ravel was still writing, Elgar had just died, Beethoven had died a little over a century earlier but a blink before that, Bach…” narrates Jan in Quodlibet.
Jan is Ian, who turned ninety-one in March. He’s like the musical grandfather of these students studying at the school in which he’s invested so much of his life. My son William, who studied the cello for fourteen years with Ian at LCMS, called him in a profile he wrote for school, a “living history book.”
Over the many years I zoomed with Ian to write this book, he’d often—with just a little nudging—pull up from his stash of stories a treasure for the entry we were working on: he’d played that Mahler symphony at a resort in the Netherlands with a name so difficult to pronounce that the Germans in the Second World War caught English spies by making them say it; the famous Russian harpist Maria Korchinska, who’d played for Lenin’s funeral, had refused a fancy dinner after performing with Ian in Edinburgh and insisted on a pub: “Musicians don’t eat at fancy restaurants,” she said. “Cancel the reservation.” His drawing of her speaks too with the story.
We were working on an entry about Carnegie Hall and all the greats who have played there, like Arthur Rubinstein (1887-1982). He mentioned about the many times from the cello section of the LSO when he’d observed the piano soloist performing. I said, “Draw that view, write it, get that perspective; it’s probably one of few left in the world.” A few days later, Ian had this: “…His fingers flew unobserved; his face was forever passive. However formidable the difficulties or subtle the emotional nuance, Rubinstein’s body remained erect, aloof—though that would be the wrong word. Unforgettable.”
We were brainstorming the cellist drawings he was to do for each of the “month” pages – for October, a cellist with his case walking through leaves, bundled up for January, with an umbrella for March. I mentioned Joel Stobbe who was known for riding his unicycle to work with his cello on his back. Before the conversation was even over, Ian had rendered most of his drawing of Joel. Our cover image was done the next morning!
You’re warmly invited to the launches. In Vancouver at the Canadian Music Centre, Alan Crane will perform a piano version of the Apotheosis that Joel and his orchestra will perform in Langley. Stravinsky was Ian’s teen hero; his commentary on the movement is the last sentence of the book: “A tender farewell. Stravinsky at the end of this ballet keeps repeating a phrase, elongating the harmonies accompanying it, describing so well the moment of departure.”
