Oxford, Wednesday

A massed band of mouth organs in an Oxford college might sound like the final nightmare of the dreaming spires. No such thing. The summer school of music now going on at Worcester College aims at banishing such old-fashioned thoughts.

Experts are demonstrating the value for school, youth club, and chamber groups of this once-frivolous instrument, about which Dr Leslie Russell, the senior musical adviser to London County council, considers that we ought to do some “serious thinking.” The people taking part, mostly teachers and students, come from all parts of Britain and from Canada, Australia, Malaya, and Nyasaland. Larry Adler has certainly started something.



Respectable

In making the mouth organ respectable the organisers do not have to trouble about making it musical. It was that already, and there are plenty of people in these corridors and courtyards – not exclusively those connected with the firm of Hohner, which has sponsored the occasion – to acknowledge and demonstrate the fact. It rather dates one to doubt its musicality, just as nobody really needs at this point of the English musical renaissance to be told that its proper name is the harmonica. Some fairly serious music has already been written for it. Vaughan Williams has given us a romance and Gordon Jacob a divertimento with string quartet, while Arthur Benjamin and Malcolm Arnold have both produced harmonica concertos.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ronald Chesney, harmonica player circa 1950. Photograph: Erich Auerbach/Getty Images

Dr Jacob is coming along on Friday to hear what they make of his work. Nobody looks in the least apprehensive. I found his soloist, a dental surgeon, practising in a small dark room and winning from his tiny mouthful of musical instrument – scarcely bigger than a bar of chocolate or a dental plate – a line of romantic melody of extraordinary purity and sadness. In a room near a group was running over some complex improvisations by Arnold Van Wyk on Dutch folk-songs, and down the corridor a Manchester University student was busy with a little thing he had just composed for two harmonicas and two clarinets. We are off. England will once again be a nest of singing birds in the new Elizabethan Age – or the modern, slightly draughty equivalent.

More elementary work was going on in a class conducted by Mr A. W. Rowe, an energetic headmaster in a green sweater who was in right at the start of this thing. A score of young men and rather older women were getting to grips under his control with “Pease Pudding Hot,” and one of the women protested at the awkwardness of the breathing. “Use your nose to expel the breath,” Mr Rowe advised as he walked round testing the grip. First you have got to teach the teachers; that is the object of the week’s exercise.

200-page manual

Mr Rowe is part author of an elaborate new 200-page manual for the harmonica which is expected to form a fruitful school partnership with the recorder. This work takes nothing for granted, and its detailed instructions start from scratch. If music-making is to spread in our schools as swiftly as we want, say the authors, then the non-musician who is keen on music will have to play his part. A good deal of the instruction – “crumbs and sticky saliva or sweets will ruin your instruments if they get under the reeds” – is plainly intended for something below summer school level.

Mr H. A. J. Woolfenden, the chief organiser, admits that there are some very beautiful harmonica adaptations of Fauré, Debussy, and other composers, but he laments this. It means that original writing for the instrument is held back. He hopes that one result of this residential school will be that more composers “will get down to the job of writing for the harmonica.” There are a number of students of composition on the course, and this encourages him.

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Prejudice survives, but he thinks it is swiftly diminishing. “You don’t get it at the top of the musical tree – there you get understanding right from the start. You still get a snooty L.R.A.M. spinster or two occasionally sneering at the instrument – usually because they have never really heard it. When they do listen to it with unprejudiced ears they change their minds.” Those who came to scoff, in short, remain to play.