Wrong Sex, Wrong Instrument

Maggie Cotton

Description

Now retired and no longer silenced by a contract, Maggie Cotton presents an honest and long-overdue player's perspective of life inside a professional symphony orchestra, describing how she became the first female percussionist in what was initially a staunchly male-dominated world. Now retired after forty years with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Maggie gives a fascinating and humorous insight into every aspect of her working life, including tours, conductors, composers, soloists, colleagues, recording contracts and educational work, as well as her own family life and the social conditions of wartime England and post-war Eastern Europe. Bolstered by her gritty Yorkshire roots, and naively undeterred by overwhelming odds, Maggie overcame many hurdles in pursuit of her ambition to play percussion in a professional symphony orchestra, in so doing transforming the face of women in that field from one of novelty circus performer to respected professional and colleague.

Sujets

• Percussion instrument

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 27 juillet 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908382979
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page





WRONG SEX, WRONG INSTRUMENT






Maggie Cotton




Publisher Information

First published in 2006, Reprinted and Updated in 2007 and 2009 by
Apex Publishing Ltd
PO Box 7086, Clacton on Sea, Essex, CO15 5WN
www.apexpublishing.co.uk

Digital version converted and published in 2011 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com

Copyright © 2006-2009 by Maggie Cotton
The author has asserted her moral rights

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition, that no part of this book is to be reproduced, in any shape or form. Or by way of trade, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser, without prior permission of the copyright holder.

Production Manager: Chris Cowlin
Cover Design Andrew Macey
Cover Photos: Mark Walmsley, Yorkshire Evening News
Cartoon: Jeremy Ballard




Dedication


Dedicated to the memory of Adrian Smith.
Musician, writer, teacher and dear friend who gave unstinting time and patience, enabling me to climb many learning curves during the writing of this book.




Foreword

Maggie Cotton has been a presence in my life for 40 years, ever since as a university undergraduate in Birmingham I attended my first City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra concert and spotted this redhead with attitude playing in the orchestra’s ‘kitchen’ department.
I hated her for a while when she was brought in as a professional to play the percussion part in a university-promoted performance of Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale , something which, as an amateur percussionist, I’d coveted myself.
I hated her even more when several years later she started to make the occasional (but always telling) contribution to Classical Music magazine, bringing revealing insights from the player’s side of the rostrum. “This woman is not only a fabulous musician, but she can write, too!” I grumped to myself.
But it was a pleasure to get to know her when I was fortunate enough to be invited to spend time touring with the CBSO, and to experience her warmth, her friendliness, her innate commonsense, her inability to suffer fools (a trait we share) and her undimmed idealism.
And when she retired from the orchestra I was quick to invite her to join my hand-picked reviewing team on the Birmingham Post . I know it took her a lot of courage to accept, but she worked assiduously at the technical nuts and bolts of the task, writing to length, meeting deadlines, taking on board the quirks of italicisation and punctuation, and learning to swallow hard and shrug her shoulders when her fondly-shaped criticisms were mangled by insensitive subeditors.
Naturally there are restrictions on her reviewing work. She obviously has to steer clear of anything involving the CBSO and its extended family, and it was a while before I thought it fair to ask her to comment upon the work of other British orchestras as well, as she knew so many of their members. There are still certain composers and instruments which make her eyes glaze over, but she is a marvel at gritting her teeth and biting the bullet if I beg her to: that’s part of her boundless good nature, and that is a quality which leaps from the page in this fascinating blend of autobiography, social history and musical plain speaking.
I like to think of this as only the first instalment of Maggie’s Memoirs. The life she has led since retiring from the CBSO has been full of interest and incident, travel and cookery, gardening and talk-giving - and she has never lost her passion for the young, and for encouraging their talents.
More than enough material for at least another volume! But for the moment, enjoy this one. You will be hooked and enthralled, as I was when she first shyly (unusual quality for her) showed it me.

Christopher Morley
Classical music correspondent, Birmingham Post



Setting the Scene

Whatever possessed the powers-that-be to go to the girls’ grammar school to look for a timpanist for the local youth orchestra, rather than to the lads’ school down the road at Huddersfield College, one will never know. Choral rather than instrumental music was the order of the day for the young ladies, albeit seasoned with a good layer of piano rivalry, producing high standards of accompanying and solo performances throughout the school.
As a bemused bunch of fifteen-year-olds, we duly presented ourselves at the empty, old-fashioned school hall used for orchestra rehearsals and watched as an old lady struggled to pull the legs out of a pair of hand-tuned timpani before levelling the instruments ready for playing. Miss Brearley was of doughty Yorkshire stock, from a dynasty of fine musicians. Her father had been the conductor of a respected local amateur orchestra and, with brothers playing professionally in both the Hallé and Liverpool Philharmonic orchestras, it seemed only natural that Alice, the youngest in the family, should be called upon to “tune those drums” the very pair of timpani now being used by the youngsters in the Youth Orchestra. Eyes sparkling, she always enjoyed a good kettledrum part with plenty of neatly turned tonics and dominants confirming very satisfactory final cadences; her enthusiasm was catching.
The sticks that she had brought along were made of slightly flexible, golden-brown Malacca cane, with small, turned, ebony knobs set with a mother-of-pearl star at one end and firm felt balls at the business end. These were fixed onto the cane through a flattish rosewood disk. I was shown how to turn the taps on the old-fashioned, deep-bowled instruments: clockwise to sharpen the note; anti-clockwise to flatten the note. For the life of me I could not hear a specific note on either instrument, just the ominous creaking of the calfskin heads when tension was being applied. Head down, hum into the skin, and if a sympathetic note came back, then the drum was tuned evenly. It was quite a feat listening for subtle changes of pitch in the hot rehearsal hall whilst counting bars and trying to work out how to play a neat drum roll. But I realised immediately that this was what I wanted to do: play in an orchestra - any orchestra. Fortunately, I must have shown more spark than the other candidates. Perhaps it was the workmanlike manner in which I dusted the calfskin heads, but in any event I was the one subsequently chosen to replace the absent Huddersfield Youth Orchestra timpanist.
With the Blackpool Music Festival looming on the horizon, and Mendelssohn’s Ruy Blas overture on the music stand, I had been thrown in at the deep end, the only tuition on offer being a detailed explanation of the layout of timpani music. For a pianist to have only two notes to worry about was indeed a novelty and, in spite of also having hordes of rest bars to count, this did not seem too tall an order, but my first experience of orchestral playing was that everything was very loud. I could not hear the strings at all when the brass sections were at full throttle, but then that added to the novelty of an inside-out orchestra sound from my new viewpoint: brass in front, strings at the back. There was no time to worry about being brave enough to come in with personal contributions as the music flew by, as I had enough to do to keep my place on that strange-looking part.
For some time I had flirted with the idea of learning an instrument to give me access to playing orchestral music, after being bowled over by a performance of Sibelius’s First Symphony by the now defunct Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra in Huddersfield Town Hall. This was to be a turning point in my young life. Up to then there had been the usual Peter and the Wolf experiences, but this was a very different kettle of fish. I had no idea that music could sound like that, and now, in retrospect, I guess that those sweeping phrases, sparse open-air harmonies, urgent rhythms and gutsy, physical music touched my northern soul. It was as simple as that. (Decades later, in the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra [CBSO], conductor Simon Rattle casually remarked in rehearsal that Sibelius’s music followed the Finnish speech patterns. Suddenly all became obvious and clear the stuttering, lisping rhythms creating unique music, even more understandable after we visited Helsinki and heard the language for ourselves.) I reeled around for weeks trying to recapture the intoxication of that music, driving my parents mad by searching for more Sibelius on the one and only radio at home. My father, a dedicated Beethoven fan, could not for the life of him understand what all the fuss was about.
This musical ‘Road to Damascus’ was the catalyst for a year of agonies trying to learn the viola at school, achieving little success in spite of getting into the local Schools’ String Orchestra. The alto clef always eluded me, so I cheated by reading the music interval by interval. When it dawned that the nasty noises emanating from my patch in the orchestra were of my own making, I had the grace and sense to give up the unequal struggle. It must have been obvious from the start that the viola and I were not made for each other. However, I know that my volatile Polish teacher had been initially deceived, as I was an accomplished pianist and obviously musical, so possibly he imagined that I was being deliberately obtuse.

* * *

Born in 1937, I knew only the privations of wartime and pos