Without music, my life is stuck in the wrong key

Watching the Hallé orchestra this week left Will Gore an emotional wreck, and wondering about his life choices

I have often thought how much comfort there must be in being able to make music, to play an instrument for nobody’s pleasure but your own (Getty)

Regrets? I’ve had a few – but none more longstanding than my failure to learn a musical instrument.

I tried briefly, having piano lessons for a year or so when I was seven. I remember learning a basic ditty called “Let Us Chase the Squirrel”, the endless repetitions of which annoyed me as much as anyone else in the house. A squirrel could probably have played it better.

In my early teens, I fancied myself to be in love with a girl about whom I knew almost nothing except that she had a beautiful face and played the violin. If only I had stuck at the piano, I felt sure that a harmonic connection might have been possible – putting aside the fact that I never spoke to her and only met her briefly twice. Still, I blamed my lack of musicality.

In adulthood, I have – like every respectable, middle-class parent (however much they deny it) – seen in my children a means to correct my own deficiencies, so when my daughter suggested she might like to learn the guitar I was thrilled. But regrettably, it soon became clear that she was as committed to practising as her father had been 30 years before. I don’t think she even attempted the squirrel song.

There was one glorious moment at a school concert (I use the term loosely), when my daughter – instead of playing a known tune badly, as all the other children had done – decided to deliver her own composition, a factually-based instrumental titled “Martha, the Last Carrier Pigeon”. With the guitar positioned on her lap like a dobro, our sweet eight-year-old plucked strings seemingly at random, perhaps channelling poor Martha’s final discordant moments. It was beguiling madness; a peak never scaled again. Guitar lessons stopped soon after. Perhaps my daughter will also regret it one day.

The orchestra played with such emotional panache that I was glad to have a face mask to cover my wobbling lower lip

On Thursday, I had the good fortune to see and hear the Hallé orchestra perform at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall. It was the first classical music concert I had attended since the world descended into Covid horror, and the orchestra began with a rendition of the Ukrainian national anthem. How wonderful, I thought, to be able to show such moving solidarity.

The concert continued with Gershwin’s An American in Paris, that stupendous, jaunty cacophony; followed by Korngold’s violin concerto, which was new to me, and fabulously played. The violinist, Ning Feng, took the audience into the interval with a fast-faced, plucked and bowed run-through of the British national anthem that was pure virtuosity. A group of schoolchildren were in the crowd and I hoped they might feel inspired to pick up an instrument.

As if all this was not enough, the show ended with Leonard Bernstein’s “Symphonic Dances” from West Side Story, which the orchestra played with such emotional panache that I was glad to have a face mask to cover my wobbling lower lip. How wonderful, I thought again, to have the skills to cause such a reaction in an audience by playing so beautifully.

During the more isolated periods of the past two years, I have, like so many people, found comfort in recorded music. Yet I have often thought how much comfort there must be in being able to make music, to play an instrument for nobody’s pleasure but your own. The best I can do is a rough and ready version of “O Tannenbaum” on a harmonica.

Still, at least I can sing to myself. And I do, incessantly, to the irritation of my wife, my children, my neighbours and the cat. But it’s still music, of a sort.

In fact, next week I’m off to sing some joyful karaoke. The regrets about that will only be among anyone who has the misfortune to hear me.