What a music festival, a forest walk, and a hospital trip taught about clarity, connection, and coming home.
This year marked the longest stay in Aldeburgh for its annual Festival of Music and the Arts. Reviews (there are plenty) are one thing, but the wider experience of Festival going gives the complete picture. Here then, a kind of an extended letter home to an imaginary recipient eager to hear of thoughts and feelings arising this most special of busman’s holidays.
The walk
Festival walks first appeared Aldeburgh line up since 1975. Back then, local historian Norman Scarfe who had previously written a popular Shell Guide to Suffolk in 1960, sat on the Festival Council, introducing the idea of festival walks and bus tours. These became a feature of the Festival, documented the programme books during the 1990s and beyond.
This year’s excursion, one of two, took me to Tunstall Forest, where for three hours an assembled coach load of die-hard Festival goers, retirees, introverts and creatives, committed themselves to a steady walk through the dappled sunlight of Tunstall’s lush Forestry Commission woodland. Writer Zoe Gilbert whose words Helen Grime set to music in the concert featuring the Knussen Chamber Orchestra and Claire Booth, led the group on an escape back to childhood, encouraging game participants to experiment writing their own fairy tales as we progressed through the forest.
Fairy tales, as Zoe reminds us, follow a pattern of journey, challenge, helpers and a gift. Towards we the end we all pause to sum up the walk, during which time a small group clusters around a pair of mating insects, everyone consumed by nature doing its work. Stood away from the group and leaning against the gate I’m in a hospital scene rather than a fairy tale forest, where a 90-year-old family psychodrama is once again playing itself out. This is then a fairy tale moment. A walk, a forest, in which a gift is found. Not a solution, but maybe peace. Certainly clarity.
The music
If a meditative walk through the forest raised awareness and stimulated connection with nature, so relatively unconventional settings prompted different thinking. Similarly off the beaten track, a performance by EXAUDI and violinist Ruby Colley premiering a work created in collaboration between Colley and her non-verbal brother Paul. Projected onto the large screen on the wall of the Peter Pears Recital Room, a large picture of the two of them together, warm smiles, excited eyes.
Paul sits in his seat rocking forward and back, at one end of the single horseshoe row of audience chairs. We listen to a multi-movement work that invites listeners into a world of communication Rob and Ruby have established over the years. An odd unexpected thing happens as this highly descriptive and evocative piece of music-making that utilises live vocals and instrumentation, some of it looped playback. We’re not listening to something hostile or alien, nor a depiction of the feeling of distance or isolation, but one which is surprisingly inclusive. We learn too that his communication is interpreted though smiles, sounds he generates and, importantly the eyes.
It reminds me of time spent filming the work of a speech therapist for a charity in Kathmandu working with disabled children. In a country where English wasn’t spoken amongst staff and children, facial expressions was currency, and the eyes confirmed understanding. Relying on other senses quickly became a form of communication and ultimately connection, making each day of filming intensely emotional, rewarding and ultimately exhausting.
The same experience surfaces listening to Ruby Colley and EXAUDI. As we step out of the Peter Pears Recital Room and into the sunshine of the courtyard, I pass Paul who looks, whispers something, and looks straight at me, his eyes widening. It is a humbling moment, and instinct informs to match his smile and say thank you. It’s only later back at my accommodation reading through the Festival programme notes I discover this is Paul’s ‘gentle invitation for connection’ that is sometimes also shyness, ‘usually … a way to inspire quiet connection’.
At the heart of the experience are concerts, two or sometimes three a day in varying locations, an opportunity to prioritise time to travel and space to think in a way that conventional concert-going doesn’t always afford. The intensity of listening changes, impact is felt more keenly, detail emerges more readily. As a result, highlights are more clearly visible. Matthews’ opera, a beautiful staging of an ambiguous story. Dunedin Consort’s triumphant Markus Passion that had seen a standing ovation. Gavin Higgins’ glorious premiere Speak of the North. George Fu and Lotte Betts-Dean profound musical meditation on grief. Helen Grime’s explosive Violin Concerto. Performances that build lasting memories, underscored with the crunch of gravel, the sound of waves breaking on the shore, and gingerly accessing your attic accommodation without hitting your head on the roof (never has a return to London made my home feel quite so spacious).
The return
Running concurrently sirens sounding on the other side of the county where, in the latest event in a series of health-related scares, my father is taken into hospital again, this time with a recurring infection. Journeys to west Suffolk take me out of the bubble and into another, on one occasion to some of the newest ward builds on the now dilapidated hospital site in Bury St Edmunds. Another trip to witness decline, and to determine and negotiate what the next steps should be. It turns out my skills at negotiation with a 90 year old demand more than logic or duty, but something far more counter-intuitive – inaction. These trips aren’t interruptions to the Festival experience as forming a part of the greater whole.
I first came to Aldeburgh in 1989, me playing in Suffolk Youth Orchestra, my parents making what felt to them as quite the expedition from Brandon to see me play on a Sunday afternoon. A few years later I’m working there, even considering renting a converted old people’s home with friends, just a stones throw from where I’m staying on the High Street for this year’s festival. Aldeburgh is home – that’s why I keep returning here. I found home here. Thirty-six years later I’m returning to the other side of the county where I always felt I was escaping to see the other side of the story, so to speak. It’s a heavy weight, but an inevitable one. Later in the week I bump into an old school friend, herself a performer in one of the concerts this year, and who played a pivotal role in introducing me to Suffolk Youth Orchestra in the first place. There are roots put down here which are difficult to dig out. This experience of Aldeburgh and Suffolk goes beyond simply attending concerts, but being somewhere to feel complete both now and in the past.
A new role
This sense of completeness resonates more in an unexpected invitation that comes in late before the Festival begins. A talk moderator has had to withdraw their availability, and would I be available to step in. I say yes, spectacularly failing not to bite the requester’s hand off in the process, donning my rarely worn suit and stepping out in front of a 300-strong audience. Such is my excitement in the Britten Studio that I fail to introduce either myself nor the speaker, Paul McCreesh, this highlighted by a member of the audience who comes up to me afterwards to say how much she’d enjoyed the experienced ‘but, who are you?’ When a contact I bump into in the concert hall foyer points out that a Radio 3 presenter had managed to do exactly the same thing, the self-criticism wanes and I bask in the joy of an unexpected experience that feels like a natural extension of all things Thoroughly Good.
More encounters
An old friend from university for whom classical music is a natural bedfellow, joins me for the final weekend I’m in Aldeburgh. By this stage I am, in all honesty, feeling the slightest hint of suffocation and yearning to go back to London. It’s her first trip to the Festival, her first experience of Aldeburgh in the glorious sunshine. Walking – a great deal of it is on the agenda. We walk from Martello Tower to Thorpness. We walk for miles in and around Southwold, and around the Concert Hall too, where I invite her to reflect on how she feels as a newcomer to the hall in comparison to those congregating outside on the edge of the marsh. I see loose fitting linen, shade-giving hats, and comfy cushions brought from home to mitigate the concert hall’s tired wicker seats. “It feels a bit posh,” she says to me. My heart creaks under the weight of the statement. It all feels so normal, everyday. Relaxed. Come as you are. A world away from my Glynebourne experience where shorts on a hot sunny day felt, despite my intent, shabby and attention grabbing. As we head into the auditorium (I lead her into the space like a proud homeowner giving a guided tour of the newly redecorated interior) I’m left wondering whether the perception of difference in these spaces is for some predetermined by the assumptions they hold when they even think of classical music. No amount of welcoming and reassuring is going to mitigate that sense of difference. But we must keep on trying.
As we sit down I’m reminded of the exchange with an audience member in the car park after a concert earlier in the week. “Are you a critic?” she calls out to me as she strides with purpose towards me. I shuffle uncomfortably from foot to foot, eager to escape into the air conditioned interior of the car. “I write about classical music.” “Yes, but you’re reviewing aren’t you. I can tell you. I saw you with your notebook.” I say yes. “Well what did you think?” I extol my experience of the concert we’ve both of us just heard with confidence. “Well, you’re completely wrong,” she replies. “I thought it was repetitive. So very repetitive and dull.”
It’s easy to see this as a problem which needs solving, or a behaviour that needs correcting. I see it as an act that poses more questions, as well as material waiting its turn for future development. Us creatives seek out challenge to develop ideas and deepen thinking. The difference here in the car park and in those observations made by my friend, aren’t a necessarily a problem that needs to be solved, but an opportunity to mix with a range of different personalities. To be curious, to see, hear and feel different things, and to see where different thoughts and ideas take us. It is how we respond to difference that matters most. A visit with friends back home to fortify the soul for the year ahead.
Yet, as the Festival ends for another year, this year’s reflections connect up with one another. This process of self-medicated artistic and cultural enrichment throws light on the predicament of an ageing parent and his reluctance to stop work though mobility and cognition may inform otherwise. In revisiting home, am I pursuing the same inevitable path my father is. At what point will I need to stop? And will I be able to take the decision, he is frightened to face?
