A great insight into John Fletcher
I
mentioned the 1979 Andre Previn book 'Orchestra' a while ago. Here is the first of John's contributions, there are four or five of these pearls scattered through the book. I'll post each one, in an irregular series.
"For me, as for others I know, the National Youth Orchestra was a wonderful training, a forming point. In the NYO, and at home, I was encouraged to regard music as a hobby which one must pursue seriously and to the very best of one's ability. The thought of going into the profession never really occurred to me at that stage. Then, about my third year of university, I suddenly found something happening to me as - I've been amused to observe - it happens to others who went to university to get proper degrees in proper subjects leading to proper jobs. My degree was in chemistry and natural sciences, followed by a Dip. Ed. I was going to be a teacher, like the rest of the family. Then I had this horrifying thought that the Cambridge University Orchestra would probably be the best orchestra I would ever play in, for the rest of my life. Would I tell my children, with some resentment, that I might have been a very good player? So I decided to have a go at the profession.
I played the horn in Cambridge most of the time, and a little trombone - the tuba was too cumbersome to cart down from Leeds. Cambridge was then the most remarkable centre for amateur music-making. Playing at a very decent level but with great innocence, one could get through an enormous amount of music in a very short time. Always on too little rehearsal, and if anything went wrong we could only smile. But I look round the profession now, at my vintage, and see so many players from Cambridge University, and all people who went there with a vague view of doing a 'proper' job. It's an uncomfortable fact that not many of the music undergraduates at Cambridge were much good at playing. But we were separate from official university music. Fred Karno's army, packing in whatever we could - orchestra, chamber music, playing for pleasure in the privacy of our four walls. One heard remarkable playing, good as well as bad.
On the face of it I'm envious of those who had a proper musical training at music college. All that time doing long notes and arpeggios, tonguing exercises, working on music in practise and theory. I just got up and played things, did what I was good at and ignored - or had to ignore - what I was no good at, which of course is a rather shaky foundation for a professional musician. One lives with that - no proper technical grounding. But having taught for the last twelve years at places like the Royal Academy of Music, I find the time wasted distressing. In theory there is all the time in the world, yet in fact students may just piddle about. I believe that if you're stretched and interested, you can do more in half an hour, packing practise into a corner of the day, getting at it in a concentrated fever, than you can do in a whole day of official time-tables. Those people reading science at Cambridge, who have walked into posh London orchestral jobs, did they really have time to do all those arpeggios properly? Surely they just worked with more intensity and intelligence.
And I wouldn't be surprised if I didn't get as much orchestral experience at Cambridge as I would at a music college. In the London Symphony Orchestra we still take on board people who've never played Beethoven symphonies, never seen them, and were never encouraged to see them. That's very, very sad. And there are still fiddle players perfecting the Cesar Franck Sonata which they'll never be asked to play after college. I wonder, does everyone expect to be a soloist? That's hideously unrealistic, so stupid. But there is this tradition, specially among strings, that nobody wants to play in an orchestra. It's awful to think that people are sliding into orchestras because they couldn't play the Franck Sonata or the Beethoven quartets. English orchestral players have certain virtues, like their fantastic sight-reading ability. That comes from necessity, from the way we work. But our training is defective, unbalanced."
