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

Tonight I have the first of my two weekly viol consort classes.

John Beckett started up a viol class in the Royal Irish Academy of Music in 1973. I was already playing the viol in my renaissance band, The Consort of St Sepulchre. We played recorders, viols, crumhorns, drums and odd extra things, and sang. We gave concerts of 'Medieval and Renaissance Music' with a strong emphasis on the 16th century, and we took our inspiration largely from John Beckett's London group, Musica Reservata.

Musica Reservata broke up in the early seventies and John Beckett came home to live in Bray and work in Dublin. We were alarmed to see our musical hero turning up at one of our concerts, but he was kind to our efforts, or at least not unkind. He was unpredictably capable of being remarkably tolerant or remarkably rude to students. In one of his baroque chamber music classes he asked a singer 'Are you doing it that way because you like it, or out of sheer incompetence?' He simply couldn't restrain himself. In this case the singer (now a science professor in Australia) confessed immediately to incompetence. He called himself a fiver, not being quite a tenor, and that tickled John. Other students vanished and never reappeared.

In 1977 St Sepulchre's wound down, when my co-director went off to Holland to take his doctorate, becoming the world authority on the crumhorn. I then joined John Beckett's viol consort class. It ran for two hours every Wednesday from 7 to 9 pm, and quite often afterwards we would all go across the road to Kennedy's bar. John would drink whiskey, sometimes flavoured with a clove of garlic, and then drive home to Bray.

When John left Dublin again in 1983, to work for the BBC in London, I took over his class and it still persists. Now it takes place in my house rather than the Academy, and it has expanded to Tuesday as well as Wednesday evenings. We play consort music, more in the form of a session than a lesson. One of my Tuesday group was John's first viol pupil in Dublin, and a founder member of the 1973 class.

I almost typed that you had more strings to your bow than I realised, then I realised that I would have unintentionally created an awful pun, so decided not to.

However, I am very impressed. I've always enjoyed early music and studied at my university because they promised that I could study the early clarinet... and then when I got there it transpired that I couldn't. Still, I have a lot of admiration for those that do.

Thank you, Vip! We weren't all that studious; we surfed on the scholarship of others, until Barra went off and studied the crumhorn in depth. He became a musical academic, and has just retired as a professor. I didn't go quite so far.

Early music is great. I must seek out more of it. Shame you aren't closer. (Or shame I'm not closer).