Tom Roper's Weblog

…an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge…” R.B. Sheridan The Rivals, 1775

Category: Music

  • What’s in the singles box?

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    Tom Roper
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    On Facebook, Tominthelibrary posted the first ever independent singles chart, from Record Week, published thirty-five years ago. The Wikipedia entry for the UK Indie Chart cites the following work as its source:  Lazell, Barry (1997). Indie hits : 1980-1989 : the complete U.K. independent charts (singles & albums). London: Cherry Red. I was astonished that I…

  • Unity or partition

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    Tom Roper
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    I have no vote in Thursday’s referendum in which the SNP are urging Scotland to secede; I think I should, but that won’t change in the next forty-eight hours. So I hope those who can vote will look at history. Most people in Ireland, divided in 1920, want a united island. Partitions since 1945, those…

  • Have you got your pen and notebook ready?

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    Tom Roper
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    Tomorrow I see Van Morrison, for the first time since 1974. Then, with nothing but a bottle of gin to sustain me, I saw him at the Knebworth festival with Tim Buckley, the Allman Brothers, Alex Harvey and others. Tomorrow, I shall have eaten. Also, I shall not have to walk back miles until I…

  • So farewell then….

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    Tom Roper
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    …Mick Farren, 1943-2013. I still have two of his vinyl albums, Mona, which he made after the Deviants split up, and Ptoof! the first, under the original name of the Social Deviants. They're shelved in an alcove and the cats love to sit on them. At Kent University, we once persuaded the university radio station…

  • The Cambridge-Heidelberg Youth Orchestra in 1972

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    Tom Roper
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    In 1972, with a number, I can't remember how many, of other young Cambridge musicians, I was selected to be part of the exchange trip to Heidelberg. These began in 1962, hence the fiftieth anniversary celebrations at which I write these reminiscences. In alternate years a group would make its way from one city to…

  • Fest-Konzert ‘O Fortuna”

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    Tom Roper
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    I am in Heidelberg for the fiftieth anniversary of the Cambridge-Heidelberg-Montpellier youth orchestra and have just heard the most sensational concert. I was last here forty years ago when I was lucky enough to be picked as one of the Cambridge contingent to visit Heidelberg for ten days of rehearsals, culminating in a concert at…

  • The Spirit of Schubert

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    Tom Roper
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    The Spirit of Schubert continues to please me; I have yet to switch on the radio and think, 'oh, no, not Schubi again' (I am grateful to Alexandra Loske for this colloquial diminutive). Of course, I have not listened to it all, or anything like, but even the fragments are interesting, even that fugue subject…

  • Franz is unwell

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    Tom Roper
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    I am looking forward to Radio 3’s Spirit of Schubert season. All his music will be played, at one point or another, over . They have gone to town with social media, with a Tumblr and a Twitter account, the latter under the name Franz is unwell. My introduction to Schubert came I think through…

  • Music in public libraries

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    Tom Roper
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    We enter the new year in a storm of activity against public library cuts. Groups all over the country are preparing for the 5th February read-ins, and the media are running story after story, too many for me to keep up with, so see the excellent Publlc Libraries News, maintained by Ian Anstice. There’s an…

  • Carry on camping

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    Tom Roper
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    I am following, and enjoying greatly, Jon Boden’s project A Folk Song a Day. What I did not know, until reading the blog that accompanies the songs, was that Boden and others came to many of these songs through Forest School Camps. The torrential rain of recent days reminds me of my stay in an…

  • Passions

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    Tom Roper
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    If you came here looking for a post on erotic passions, I suggest you look elsewhere. I am using the word in its oldest sense, derived from the Greek πασχω, I suffer. For while I am a militant atheist, for the next week or so I shall be listening to a lot of sacred music,…

  • My night of metal hell

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    Tom Roper
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    The ancients believed that the mother pelican fed her young by piercing her breast with her bill, and feeding them on her blood. This archetype of parental self-sacrifice is often cited chez Roper, but never with greater justification than last night when I took daughter, daughter’s friend, and daughter’s friend’s boyfriend to Brixton to see…

  • Man goes to festival shock

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    Tom Roper
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    I went, for what I think must have been the tenth year, to the Tolpuddle Festival last weekend. The world is well served by blog posts in which middle-aged men recount the interesting things that happened at festivals, but here’s my version: I met Jean Bonnin, the author of A Certain Experience of the Impossilbe;…

  • Handel on the piano

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    Tom Roper
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    To the gentleman who e-mailed Radio 3 this morning to complain about the presenter playing a recording of some Handel played on a piano as part of Handel week: Dear Sir, You understand nothing of the national culture, one of its chief components being Handel played on the piano, badly, by infants’ school music mistresses…

  • Genre/Form Thesaurus for Music

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    Tom Roper
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    I saw this on Catalogablog News from the Library of Congress. In November 2008, the Library of Congress Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate approved a Timeline and Plan for the Next Five Library of Congress Genre/Form Projects. In accordance with that timeline, the Policy and Standards Division (PSD) is beginning to develop a genre/form thesaurus…

  • Cornelius Cardew

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    Tom Roper
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    ‘What do we remember about Cornelius Cardew?’ asks Richard Gott in an article about the composer in the London Review of Books, reviewing the 1000 page biography, Cornelius Cardew: a life unfinished, by John Tilbury. What do I remember? I was an annoyingly precocious child with a strong interest in music, though without the talent…

  • Grove on Pink Floyd

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    Tom Roper
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    There is endless fun to be had browsing Grove Music Online. Prompted by some email discussions of Rick Wright’s death with the erudite and witty Guy Robinson, I looked up the entry on the Floyd. It ends with the savagely accurate observation, ‘although Gilmour’s ringing guitar and their songs’ generally slow pace help their style…

  • Torelli, Torelli and Torelli

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    Tom Roper
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    Research in Grove (now Oxford Music Online) to find out more about the composer of the trumpet concerto that stayed with me for so long finds, as is so often the case, more than one composer of that name. The composer in question is Giuseppe Torelli, 1658-1709, born in Verona, whose early career was spent…

  • CYCO

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    Tom Roper
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    I heard a piece of music on the radio that I had not heard for forty years, Torelli’s Trumpet Concerto. It is a commonplace piece of baroque writing for the trumpet, but the opening figure, played first by the orchestra and then by the soloist, has stayed in my head ever since I first heard…

  • Songs my father used to sing: number 1

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    Tom Roper
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    My mention of the song Constantinople, which turned out to be by Paul Whiteman and his orchestra, c. 1928, reminded me of more songs that my father would sing. He was prone to song while driving, while walking the dog Simon until the beast’s death when I was still quite young, or when walking en…

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