h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Here is the text of a pre-concert talk I gave yesterday in the Field Room of the National Concert Hall. It covers some of the same ground but includes a few extra things:


Joseph Groocock


Joseph Groocock is the most beloved teacher—of anything—I have ever come across. Anne-Marie O'Farrell wrote this last week on facebook: “A wonderful man. Happy memories of studying with him at DIT.” The harpist Siobhán Armstrong responded “I loved Joe Groocock. He was my fugue teacher and was such a marvellous man.” Fergal Warren said: “I think we all did, Siobhán”, and Laoise O'Brien, who had started the conversation, replied “Yes, indeed. I was, however, possibly Joe's worst ever fugue student—not helped by the fact that the likes of Dave Fennessy were in my class! Hopefully I'll make it up to him next week.” Dave himself remembered Joe remarking “I compose a fugue every day, except Christmas Day—when I compose two.” There are many claimants to the title of Joe's worst pupil, in various categories, yet they all echo the same joy in remembering him. There are also many outstanding successes in music, performers, composers, and teachers, who acknowledge an enormous debt to his teaching, one of the last being Donnacha Dennehy; he was still a schoolboy when he began lessons with Joe, but there was already mutual admiration.

Honor Ó Brolcháin, my contemporary in Joe's Mus B class in Trinity College, tells me that studying with Joe utterly changed her thoughts about music. He showed her how music analysis could be not only an art in itself, but something both delightful and exciting. Another contemporary at TCD was Eric Sweeney, who has recently retired as Professor of Music in Waterford Institute of Technology. Eric is one of our leading composers, and has continued Joe's tradition of music teaching, and nourished many more composers in turn.

There were several related inviolable principles in Joe's teaching:
Ear training is the basis of the study of music.
The goal of theory teaching is a pupil who can take musical dictation.
Never write down what you have not first clearly heard in your imagination.

In teaching, Joe maintained an almost incredible tolerance and understanding of the foibles of his pupils. He would cross out nothing, simply point out an obvious bloomer. Even then he would say, “Would Bach have done that?” and then stretch credulity to imagine a situation where Bach might conceivably have done that. But apart from his humane treatment of errant pupils, Joe did not suffer fools. His manner ceased to be mild and humble when he had to deal with music teaching that failed one or all of those ideals. His eyes would flash, he would snort loudly, the words “paper music” would be mentioned with contempt. You knew where you stood.

He had inherited this attitude from the example of his father, Edward W Groocock, a successful choirmaster, organist and teacher in Rugby and Croydon. Both father and son were outstanding accompanists and fluent improvisers at the keyboard. Joe told me once that his father would set him improvising on the piano, making frequent changes of key. Edward would name the keys as Joe wandered through them, relying on relative pitch, not absolute; in the course of a few bars Joe would go to the same note twice, but from different approaches, and Edward would correctly name it as G# or Ab, according to its context.

Joseph Groocock came to Dublin in 1935 at the age of 21, immediately on graduating from Oxford University in Classics and Music, to take up a teaching post in St Columba's College, Rathfarnham, where he was to remain for 40 years. Bright and fresh-faced, in the first few years he was frequently taken for one of the schoolboys by visiting parents.

His duties in St Columba's included playing the organ for daily services in the Chapel as well as teaching music and taking choir rehearsals, and near the end of his first year the Warden let him know that he was expected to put on a school show for the end of term. Retiring to Jammet's restaurant in Nassau Street, Joe began sketching out the first of his several musical comedies, “Jack and Jill and the Drainpipe” which begins with a chorus of washerwomen singing:

Washing is the greatest pleasure,
Washing is the greatest fun
Don't you want to come and join us now our washday's begun?
Feeling all the soapy water,
Giving all the clothes a rub,
Don't you want to come and join us round the washing tub?

This has to be envisaged with a cast of adolescent boys dressed as hugely buxom washerwomen, flinging soapsuds around the stage. There were other musicals, now lost: Joe would quite often write the words but keep the music in his head, teaching it by ear to the performers. He did (after the event) prepare a score of “Jack and Jill and the Drainpipe” for broadcast on BBC Northern Ireland, and it has been performed several times since.

His senior son-in-law (I am his number two) is David Griffith, who wrote this for “The Old Columban Bulletin” after Joe's death in 1997:

“HOW are you?” the friendly person boomed as he came down the path to welcome me, his fingers stiffly extended in what I later came to know as the man's characteristic style of greeting; the voice powerful but not overpowering, the demeanour forthright, open, calming, instantly putting at ease the 13-year-old new boy who had been directed ... to be auditioned for the choir, like all new boys by the celebrated Mr Groocock. [...] I was instantly and deeply struck by his natural ability to communicate with a young person.
[...] In all the turmoil of the first days at a new school, with all their attendant uncertainties, apprehensions and fears, here was somebody remarkable—a man who effortlessly radiated warmth, security, comfort.
[...] Others have spoken and written of his huge and sustained contribution to music in Ireland, and further afield. I write not as a player but as a listener, whose musical appetite was sharpened and developed in Joe's splendid Music Appreciation classes. There he transferred knowledge with skill, enthusiasm, patience and originality. His characteristic ability to adjust his material, and his delivery, to match the intellectual level of his audience (we never regarded these magic periods as a mere class) was just as much a feature of those weekly sessions as it was in his formal music lessons.

One of his early pupils at St Columba's was the late John Beckett, who inherited and intensified Joe's reverence for Bach. John became Ireland's first internationally famous harpsichordist, and co-director of the most influential of renaissance period-instrument bands of the 1960s, Musica Reservata. Throughout his life John admired and adored his teacher to a degree hardly short of idolatry.

A later pupil was Simon Taylor, who was looking for a guitar teacher when Joe was doing some teaching in Brook House primary school. Not finding one, Joe bought a guitar and taught himself to play it, in his fifties, in order to help Simon. Simon went on eventually to take his performer's diploma in guitar, but Joe remained tickled at the sight of his own right hand instinctively leaping open to play a tenth, which is a stretch t-h-i-s size on a keyboard but only this size on guitar. Our legacy from this exercise is Joe's utterly delightful, idiomatic and Bach-like set of eight canons for two guitars, written in 1971 and published in 1984 by Ossian Publications.

As a composer Joe followed the advice of Oscar Wilde: It's not a good idea to be too modern, one goes out of fashion so terribly quickly. As a teacher he made no pretence of understanding, or taking any interest in, serial or atonal music, despite the fact that those were virtually the only genres taken seriously in academic composition in the middle of the twentieth century. Bach was his bible, and most of what he taught in TCD was how to emulate Bach in writing chorales, inventions, canons, and of course fugues.

Joseph Groocock touched the lives of many more than his pupils at St Columba's, at Trinity, and in the Royal Irish Academy of Music and the College of Music (as the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama was then known). He made many broadcasts on musical topics for Radio Éireann, and travelled the country giving talks to gramophone societies, a remarkably popular kind of grouping that met in many towns in the 1950s and 60s. He adjudicated competitions and conducted choirs for the Irish Countrywomen's Association, as well as his beloved University of Dublin Choral Society, which he conducted for some forty years or so, until he was 70.

He was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Music by TCD in recognition of a study he made for Forás Éireann in the fifties, of the state of music in Ireland, but his academic activities hinged on his study of Bach. He wrote a completion of Bach's Art of Fugue which he performed as an organist, and he wrote a detailed book analysing Bach's Forty-eight Preludes and Fugues, which was posthumously published by the American Greenwood Press in 2003, edited by the eminent Bach scholar Dr Yo Tomita, who became thoroughly convinced of the pedagogical value of Joe's analysis. Among his listed compositions nine are canons or sets of canons (including the extraordinary feat, possibly unmatched since the renaissance, of an extended canon by double augmentation); thirteen are fugues or collections of fugues, including his own Twenty-four Preludes and Fugues for piano, and another twenty-two piano fugues, nine fugues for voices, three fugues for wind quartet and two fughettas for wind trio. Instrumental ensembles account for almost half of his listed pieces (some for friends, others as his growing family took up instruments), vocal pieces account for about a quarter, and the rest are mainly solo piano and organ works.

The greatest part of his compositions date from the last twenty years of his life. The string quartet, from 1991, was not as far as we know commissioned or dedicated to anyone in particular, but the recorder sonata was for his daughter, “my Jenny” as he called her. Jenny gave the first performance with Pádhraic Ó Chuinneagáin in 1988.

Joseph Groocock died in 1997 at the age of 83; he was still teaching full hours up to the summer when he fell ill. In hospital he was delighted by the kindness of the nursing staff. When he realised that he would not be teaching another term, his response was: “So this is dying. Bother. There really ought to be a better way.”


~Andrew Robinson
13 November 2013