Further Scrapings – Synopsis

This book is a sequel to the author’s previous volume “Scraping a Living”, the memories of a typical British violinist in the latter part of the 20^th century, and here he delves more deeply into earliest childhood memories. The ‘dark, satanic mills’ were then still belching forth plumes of black smoke, painting every building in the industrial West Riding a forbidding black, but it was relatively easy to escape into the unspoilt beauties of the Yorkshire Dales. Family life is remembered, from the special standpoint of a household where both parents were working as professional music teachers, and music was the centre of their existence. They were his sole music teachers until he won a scholarship to the RAM London aged sixteen.

However, to grow up in the twenties and thirties meant a gradually increasing awareness of threatening times ahead – a grim counterpoint to an otherwise happy existence. This led to the outbreak of war, and the student days in London began exactly when the wartime Blitz started. Three years of study, was followed by service in the Royal Marines Staff Band, under Colonel Kenneth Ricketts, alias K.J.Alford, composer of “Colonel Bogey”, the most successful march tune of all time!

After the war came membership of the Boyd Neel String Orchestra and the Philharmonia Orchestra, playing under the greatest conductors of the century. From 1955 to 1966 he was leader of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, and later held the post of Concertmaster of the BBC Training Orchestra.

There are appendices and other chapters; giving Mountain’s views on orchestral leadership, conducting, teaching and general music education which should interest musicians and lay readers alike.

Further Scrapings – Author

Author of “Scraping a Living” – 978-1-4259-8390-1 (Softcover ISBN)

Peter Mountain was born on 3^rd October 1923 in Shipley, West Yorkshire into a musical family. Violin quickly became his main interest, and in his sixteenth year he gained a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Music, London. Here he was accepted into the class of Rowsby Woof, the best-known violin professor of his day. He also played as a concerto soloist with Sir Henry Wood.

During the War, he served in the band of the Royal Marines, landing at the Mulberry Harbour in France, and being among the first British troops to enter Paris. Later, after the defeat of Japan, he led an orchestra of serving musicians sent to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to escort Louis Mountbatten, Commander South-East Asia back to his headquarters in Singapore, where they made a tour over the whole command. In Bangkok he played the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto at a concert attended by the King of Siam.

After the war he studied further with the famous Russian teacher Sascha Lasserson. He was a member of the Boyd Neel String Orchestra and the Philharmonia Orchestra. For eleven years he was leader of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, under Sir John Pritchard and Sir Charles Groves. He was Concertmaster of the BBC Training Orchestra and also Head of Strings at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. He played as soloist with many British orchestras and appeared often in chamber music, most notably in a life-long duo partnership with his wife, pianist Angela Dale.

He was awarded Fellowships of the RAM in London and the RSAMD in Glasgow. In 1992 the University of Bradford awarded him an Honorary Doctorate of Literature in recognition of his services to music education.

Chapter 1 - Early Days

In the year of my birth, the Great War of 1914 to 1918 was a relatively recent happening. I was in a similar position vis-a-vis that conflict to someone born in the early 1950’s in relation to the second great world upheaval.

In both cases, Britain was only just recovering from wartime hardships and travail.

The young people, the arts and music were forging ahead, creating the freedom and liveliness of both the Gay Twenties (and in the latter case the Swinging Sixties). But when I came into this world the pace of change was slower than in the more recent post-war era, and with the older generation Edwardian and even Victorian ideas still prevailed. My parents were quite open to progressive thinking, but the environment and the ideas of many of their contemporaries were still pretty old fashioned. The dress of both men and women was not dissimilar from Edwardian attire, but within ten or fifteen years it would all change radically; everything pointing to the fact that new ideas were in the air, and slowly but surely different times were coming.

Actual events in 1923 (although I was then blissfully unaware of them) were pointing ahead to a more threatening future. Adolf Hitler, hoping to imitate Mussolini’s March on Rome the previous year, led an unsuccessful bid for power in Munich, and was imprisoned. The German Mark plummeted to 42 million to the US Dollar. The following year Lenin died and shortly after Stalin emerged as the Russian ruler. It was the beginning of the era of the Great Dictators.

In the musical world, the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, already notorious as an extreme modernist for his “Erwartung” (1909) and “Five Orchestral Pieces” (1910), took a giant step forward. After the war he had evolved a musical system which he claimed would enable his textures to become simpler and clearer. This resulted in the "method of composition with twelve tones" in which the twelve pitches of the octave are regarded as equal, and no one note or tonality is given the status it has in diatonic harmony. He regarded this as the equivalent in music of Albert Einstein’s discoveries in Physics.  Schoenberg announced his system characteristically, during a walk with his friend Josef Rufer, when he said "I have today made a discovery which will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years" This was first employed in his “Serenade” for chamber ensemble which was premiered in 1923.

I must admit frankly that I have never been able to come to terms with twelve tone music. I don’t mind dissonance and tonal experiments of many kinds, but I am uncomfortable with the rootless feeling of music having no tonal centre. The idea of making all notes equal seems to me to be artificial. The drama and spirit of musical melody and harmony is based, I think, on the varying significance of each character in the octave scale. You can change the actual key and relish the contrasts this reveals, but to have all notes equal in significance seems essentially monotonous.  If you have an ear which remembers the actual sound of notes, generally known as perfect pitch, it is disturbing to swim in a sea of music without the shoreline of a tonic to relate to. Schoenberg certainly had genius and inspired other gifted musicians such as Alban Berg and Anton von Webern, both of whom I admire, but there were other less inspired writers who latched on to this new system and produced what seem to me musical horrors! Thank goodness we now see, well before Schoenberg’s hundred years has elapsed, that the supremacy of this system is waning fast. It occurs to me that my lifetime has seen the birth and death of the dodecaphonic system.