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

John Beckett died this morning, just short of his 80th birthday.

He was best known as a harpsichordist and as a co-director of the group Musica Reservata in London in the 1960s. This was the first group to put some wellie into the performance of early music and we Dublin students of the sixties made what you might call a tribute band, The Consort of St Sepulchre.

John was also a conductor, and he inaugurated a series of February Sunday concerts in St Ann's, Dawson Street, consisting entirely of Bach cantatas. Since he left Dublin (again) in the eighties the series has been revived, and is still running.

He taught me to play continuo on the viol, without hardly a word. I sat at his left hand in his Chamber Music Class in the Royal Irish Academy of Music, and he would stretch out his hand to give me a part to play, and again to take it back. In this way I accompanied every other participant in the class, singers and instrumentalists. Every shading of the music was clearly shown in his left hand on the harpsichord, which I doubled on the viol.

He also started and taught there a viol consort class, in 1973, which I joined as a student and now attend as teacher.

John worshipped J S Bach, and held Handel, Vivaldi and Corelli in extraordinary contempt. A phrase he used of a particular Vivaldi piece was "A cliché callously used". At a concert by the Studio für Frühe Musik, consisting of fanciful reconstructions of medieval music, his sole comment, delivered with wide-eyed incredulity, was "Science Fiction".

He learned the love of Bach from Joseph Groocock (A2116739) who taught him music in secondary school. John wrote his first fugue about the age of fourteen, leaning on a chest of drawers in the Groocock family home, while visiting them one weekend. John's admiration for Bach was closely followed by his lifelong admiration for Joe Groocock, which amounted almost to idolisation. John tried to make a career as a composer, but never did match the fame his cousin Samuel won in literature. Sam's attempt to provide a platform for John, writing "Words and Music" in collaboration with him, may after all have lowered rather than raised his credibility.

A most affectionate and faithful friend, John could be a bitter opponent with a very sharp tongue. He took some lame ducks under his wing, giving them valuable but (we thought) wasted time repeatedly in his classes. On the other hand he could be scathing to a new pupil: I heard him ask one "Are you doing it that way because you like it, or out of sheer incompetence?"

After an evening class at the Academy he would often join the students at Kennedy's pub across the road, drinking whiskey (to which he would occasionally add a clove of garlic) and coming up with outrageous bon-mots. He had unshakeable opinions about everything under the sun, delivered in a ponderous drawl; his voice was rather like the actor Patrick Magee's.

Them were the days.

If you do a google for "John Beckett" you get at least one page of other Johns first.

The musician shared the initials of his hero: J S B. "Musica Reservata" or "harpsichord" will identify him.

http://www.medieval.org/emfaq/performers/reservata.html

John was one of the first generation of brilliant harpsichordists that emerged in the middle of the last century. His playing was marked by energy and ebullient rhythm, always with the utmost clarity.

He was also an outstanding pianist, and one of the great delights of singing in his Cantata Singers was having his accompaniment at rehearsals; he was his own rehearsal pianist. He never gave less than virtuoso accounts of Bach's various instrumental solos, while missing nothing of the choir's phrasing, or lack of it.

Like many conductors who are wonderful with choirs, his relationship with orchestras was (by comparison) slightly stand-offish. They saw little nuance in his arm movements, which tended to be exta-large; and while orchestral players prefer to be shown things in the course of rehearsing, John's method was to mark each player's part, in great detail, in soft pencil (having completely erased all previous markings) in advance of the first rehearsal, and then to give further instructions verbally.

When recording, John nearly always delivered the goods on the first take. Very often the best buzz of all was to be had in his final rehearsal; despite a confident exterior, he was not at his happiest in public performance. This did not prevent him, when one went particularly well, repeating the entire cantata at a Sunday afternoon concert.

Though his attention to detail was immense, his intention in the chorales that punctuate Bach's cantatas was that we should be more like a fervent congregation than a professional choir. "Some people put expression marks into the chorales, crescendos and so on . . . but my idea of a chorale is a good-hearted mess".

[extra-large]

(not to say huge, gross, gargantuan)

Feel like turning these into an entry?

I often wonder about people who like one sort of music and dismiss another. Can all the people who like the other sort of music be wrong? Handel himself said that the common man wants music that "hits him in the drum of the ear", as far as I remember. He meant unsubtle. What's good for a first hearing will seem trite on the third or seventh. And Bach is not immediately appreciable to the uneducated ear. Interesting stuff.

I'm reminded of Rossini's comment about one of Wagner's operas.

"It's the sort of music that can't be fully appreciated on the first hearing. And I certainly don't intend to listen to it a second time."

How about Stravinsky's comment upon John Cage's 4 Minutes 33 Seconds: 'I look forward to hearing his longer pieces'. Ouch.

Now there's an entry topic: the catty remarks of the creative.

Charles Gannon is considering a Wiki entry; he's done one on his father Cathal Gannon the harpsichord maker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathal_Gannon

Cathal was greatly helped by John Beckett, who persuaded Guinness (Cathal's employer ) to give him a workshop and pay him to make harpsichords.

Masterfully written, R.

"John worshipped J S Bach, and held Handel, Vivaldi and Corelli in extraordinary contempt." - He sounds like someone who was worth knowing.

He certainly was worth knowing, and while I can see his preference for the genius of Bach I can't share his scorn for Handel. Handel wrote everything in an operatic frame of mind (sorry Felonious) and his operas are astonishing -- he creates unstoppable dramatic urgency and constant character development within the formula recit-aria-recit-aria . . . each aria creates a unique mood (what they call an affect) that moves the story on. So his counterpoint isn't as masterly as Bach's . . . so the Stones don't use such interesting chord sequences as the Beatles; too bad.

It may have come across as an affectation, but if so it was a furiously held one. José Vázquez couldn't believe anyone could do anything in Baroque music and not appreciate Corelli, but there they simply stopped talking to one another.

You've got me wrong. I quite like opera, musically speaking that is. There are some glorious tunes: the Song of the Flowers from Lakme (until it suffered death-by-commercial break) and the duet from the Pearl Fishers are fantastic.

I just don't like the thickets of snobbery and exclusivity that've grown up around it.

I respectfully point out that it is people that you that fertilise the shrubbery.

People like you

How do you work that out?

Like Malcolm McLaren said, you only disqualify yourself, no one else does. And if your tax goes to subventing it, it makes it cheaper for you too. Opera is horrendously expensive to put on. The Boston Early Music Festival bankrupted itself staging Baroque operas with all the original stage machinery faithfully reproduced.

I'd say you are a Roundhead. The Parliamentarians were as angry with Charles I over his squandering money on Masques (opera precursor) as they were about his dirty dealings with the French. They beheaded him, but the hydra of opera sprouted all the more heads. You can't lick it; why not join it?

You misunderstand me. I don't want to obliterate opera because it is expensive. I want to make it cheaper so more people can enjoy it. So why don't we have more multi-purpose venues being built such as the one in the Land of my Fathers, that can be easily adapted to putting on opera part of the time and the rest of the time be used for other purposes? Or why not have some real-time link-ups with digital cinemas so people can go and see a performance when, if not where, it is being performed? Why don't the major opera houses get together to drive down the exorbitant prices charged by agents and artists?
Believe me, it's not my disaffection that disqualifies me. Its the up-to-£150-a-throw prices for anything approaching a decent seat. That, and the fact that it's a subidised entertainment that appears to do little for the home-grown arts scene.

OK, I got you wrong there FM; sorry. But it's going to be expensive no matter what . . . and yet having said that, I attended a studio performance of Cosi Fan Tutte in New York last year, artists' co-operative production, no orchestra, no costumes lighting or staging, piano on stage, tickets $10, and it was terrific.

Apparently John was found sitting in his chair with his radio on. It was in fact his 80th birthday, the 5th of February.

For more completeness: John Beckett was also a good recorder player and viola player. It was while driving home at 4 am after an evening playing string quartets in early 1962 that he crashed his car in Little Bray, breaking both arms, a hip and an ankle and ending up in hospital for months. When he got back to playing the viola he found it more comfortable to hold it like a treble viol on his knees.

That was before I knew him; I met him when he returned to Dublin from London in 1972. I had formed a Dublin viol consort and he became effectively our guest leader for the duration of the 1970s. We gave a few concerts, and toured to the odd place like Castleisland, Co Kerry, where we were given a freezing church to play in. We outnumbered the audience, but John insisted on performing the whole programme we had prepared. In those days classical music didn't expect or get much of an audience in rural Ireland. A downward spiral effect meant that, not expecting much response, people didn't bother advertising concerts. Another group of mine and Mrs R's, "Continuo", which included the excellent David Milne on harpsichord and Geraldine Malone on oboe, with Jenny on recorder and me on bass viol, did a concert in Dundalk around that time, and the only sign of our expected presence was a rather messy card in a window saying that there would be a performance on "harpicord, recorder, obeo ect" at a certain time and place. I was ect. Again we more or less outnumbered our audience. But that happened to everyone then; Donal Lunny told us about an early Planxty (or his previous band Sweeney's Men) playing to "a couple of guys swinging out of the balcony" of an Athlone cinema.

According to James Knowlson's excellent book* on Sam Beckett, John's father Gerald was quite irreligious and used to describe life as "a disease of matter". John had quite a way with pithy epigrams; evidently it wasn't off the floor he licked it.

Gerald was a doctor who became medical officer for County Wicklow. "A quiet thoughtful man with wide-ranging interests" he was an excellent pianist and used to play duets with both Sam and John. It seems he came back from World War two with a strange piece of booty: a complete collection of Bach's cantatas in piano score. John would have been in his teens then.

John had very fond memories of his cousin Sam, who would have been just 21 years older than John (who incidentally was 21 years older than myself). So although they were first cousins, they were effectively of different generations.

Sam and John had an uncle, Howard Beckett, who had the extraordinary distinction of beating Capablanca** at chess!! Even in a multiple exhibition match, this was a feat of stunning rarity.

* Damned to Fame: the life of Samuel Beckett
** http://www.chesscorner.com/worldchamps/capablanca/capablanca.htm