Foreword
This work was inspired by a man who started off as a passing acquaintance, then a fellow-traveler, and then a great and lifelong friend who remained so even though our lives crossed but briefly and would eventually be separated by the oceans. How we lost touch, then regained touch, and discovered that our friendship had endured, is a story for the ages.
So this memoir is dedicated to him. And you’ll meet Max later, as the tale unfolds.
Chapter One: Singing In The Choir
I’ve always been able to sing, and sing well. It was a thing of complete wonder to my parents, both keen amateur singers themselves, and so I was constantly being called upon to sing to their friends and our family at various gatherings – an invitation I always firmly refused because I was painfully shy as a small boy. Also, I never bothered to learn the lyrics of any song completely, and could only sing snatches of things like Pat Boone’s Bernadine, April Love and similar ballads of the time, so any songs I’d sing would be of short duration indeed.
Then at age 11 I was shipped off to boarding school at St. John’s Preparatory School in Johannesburg, and as part of the entrance process my mother told the school’s interviewer – the College Second Master (Vice-Principal) that yes of course Kim would love to join the Prep School choir if accepted.
I passed the school’s entrance exam with ease, and when I arrived at the Prep was told to meet with the choirmaster, Mr. Robert Barsby in the Music Room. This room contained wooden benches and a full-sized Steinway concert grand piano, and the place was to be my home away from the dormitory for the duration of my time at St. John’s.
Mr. Barsby asked me to give him a song or two that I would be comfortable singing, and all I could think of was a hymn I’d learned at Sunday School, a couple of years before. He, of course, could play pretty much any piece of music, let alone There Is A Green Hill Far Away, so off I went, heart in my mouth and determined at least not to make a fool of myself.
Would I be good enough?
Halfway through the hymn – I think after the second verse – Mr. Barsby stopped playing, told me that choir practices were on Tuesday and Thursday evenings an hour before supper, took place in the same music room we were in, and would I mind being there for the next one?
At last I’d be able to sing, properly; and under Bob Barsby’s gentle tutelage over the next two years in the Prep, I became an accomplished chorister. There were two steps towards becoming proficient and getting a place in the Royal Schools Of Church Music (RSCM): the first was to become a “Senior Chorister”, the requirements being an ability to read sheet music and of course to demonstrate the ability to sing just about anything required – piece of cake. The next level, “Leading Chorister”, was a lot more difficult in that it required an ability to sing, note-perfect, an unknown piece with just the sheet music in front of one, as well as an ability to “lead” the choir so that the song would remain in tempo without a conductor.
One did not apply for such honors, of course: one had to be invited to perform the audition by the choirmaster himself. It was actually quite difficult to get the sought-after lapel badges for each level. Many boys were invited, but only a very few actually earned the privilege. In my time in the Prep School choir, there were a total of six Senior Choristers (out of about thirty boys over two years), and only two Leading Choristers. I was one, and a boy named Andrew Gibb was the other. I’d known Andy since forever; we’d been classmates at primary school (Linksfield Primary, a “government” institution), but he’d left for St. John’s a couple of years prior to my move. Like me, “Gibby” was an accomplished singer, and unlike me an extraordinary musician. Our paths would cross again and again for the rest of our lives together, as you will see later.
Then my time in Prep School came to an end, and I went over to the College (high school). This may sound like a big journey, but the College began just a passageway on from the Prep, and in fact the two schools shared the Music Room as a kind of geographical no-man’s land.
The College had a different choirmaster, James Gordon, MMus (Cantab), who was a different teacher to Bob Barsby altogether. Himself an opera singer (not to say a brilliant church organist as well), “Jimmy” was an exacting taskmaster when it came to singing, and the standard of choral music reflected that discipline. The St. John’s College Choir was renowned in the same way as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is regarded in the United States, often invited to perform on the national radio service (SABC). Also, whereas the Prep choir was all-soprano ensemble, the College choir encompassed the complete choral range, from soprano (treble) to alto, first- and second tenor, and first- and second bass.
Of course, as we boys hit adolescence, our voices changed (referred to colloquially as having one’s “balls drop”). For some, this was a catastrophic event, because for perhaps six months, their voices would fluctuate from angelic treble to an awful braying noise, and their place in the choir became uncertain. (A couple of boys actually had to leave the choir because their voices changed so radically that they could not fit in the choir’s sound at all, and they were banished to the “congregation”: a traumatic event, to be sure.)
Fortunately, my own voice changed so gradually that over three years I went from treble to alto to first tenor quite smoothly. (Eventually, after about twenty years, I would end up being a baritone.)
By far the biggest change, however, was in the music we performed: from simple ballads like Panis Angelicus, we were now called on to perform serious sacred music: colossal hymns backed by a 54-pipe organ during Sunday Mass, a cappella Plainsong (Gregorian) chants at Sunday Evensong (many in Latin), Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus (which was probably the easiest such piece we sang), and the like. And always, always we strove to achieve the incredibly-high standards set by Jimmy Gordon. He could listen to a section singing their part, then rap his conductor’s baton sharply on the music stand to make us stop, then point to one boy and say, “You’re singing flat in bar 35; please sing it for me,” and the unfortunate miscreant had to sing the part solo, over and over until he got it right. Worst of all, Jimmy was never wrong because he knew what each boy’s voice sounded like.
Of course, being a mischievous lout, I would sometimes sing a different harmony line just for the hell of it, and Jimmy would squint his eyes, make us sing it again, and then he’d scowl and point to me, saying, “Du Toit: what you are singing is not dissonant; but it is not what Bach wrote. Kindly confine yourself to what’s on the sheet.”
That discipline stayed with me all my life.
There was another side to this. We hardly ever sang popular Christmas carols, for instance, but instead performed little-known songs, some from as far back as the Middle Ages, because I think they were a lot more challenging than the “standards”. At one point we protested — I can’t remember whether it was Gibby or I who voiced our displeasure. Jimmy listened to us seriously, then nodded noncommittally and that, we thought was that. At the following choir practice he handed out sheets of the new music we were to learn to sing, and the melodies were instantly recognizable: Silent Night, O Come All Ye Faithful and so on.
Not one was in English. Instead, we got Stille Nacht (German), Adeste Fideles (Latin) and just to top it off, a totally-unfamiliar German carol Es Ist Ein Ros Entsprungen, in which we had to learn a new song and the language it was scored for.
Es ist ein Ros entsprungen,
aus einer Wurzel zart,
wie uns die Alten sungen,
von Jesse kam die Art.
Und hat ein Blümlein bracht
mitten im kalten Winter,
wohl zu der halben Nacht.
Jimmy had a sense of humor.
Another part of singing was more serious. In a choir there is no room for vibrato, because it’s impossible to reconcile all the different vibrato speeds across, say, thirty voices. So we were trained to suppress any kind of vibrato – which Jimmy referred to as “warbling”. Why was this serious? Because after a while, one’s vocal cords stiffen up with age, and by the late teens, vibrato becomes almost impossible. This non-vibrato style of singing, so necessary in choral singing, was to haunt me much later.
One other thing is worth mentioning at this point. We were so immersed in music that most of us choirboys developed “perfect pitch” – the ability to hear a note and immediately identify its position on the scale: C, G, E-flat, F-sharp, whatever, without needing to refer to the sheet music or needing a piano to play the note first. Add to this our constant discipline in keeping time, and once again most of us could not only keep in perfect tune while singing, we could sing in perfect time without needing a metronome. All Jimmy Gordon needed to tell us was “You’ll sing this piece at forty BPM” (beats per minute), and off we’d go. If we were wrong, he would sigh with exasperation and set the metronome to keep time, all while glaring at the Leading Choristers.
Our singing was not confined to the choir. In my final year in the Prep, the school had put on a production of Ivor Novello’s Huckleberry Finn, the choir of course comprising most of the cast, and I was in the chorus – not a lead character, to my initial chagrin but later profound gratitude – standing next to Gibby on the one side and my boyhood friend Mark Pennels on the other. (Pennels would deserve an entire chapter all to himself if I were writing a full autobiography, but in these memoirs he was just a constant and treasured singing companion.)
It was my first real exposure to the musical stage, and it was to prove a pivotal point in my musical life within a few years. It was great fun, but I found the ensemble nature of a stage production exhausting.
College, when I arrived there, was a different experience altogether. Every other year the school would put on a musical play, usually one of Gilbert & Sullivan’s operettas, in which we as the choir were enrolled without any choice involved – most activities in the College were compulsory – and so we endured productions of Iolanthe, H.M.S. Pinafore and Yeoman Of The Guard over the next five or so years. When I say “endured” the musical stage productions, it was largely because of two factors. The first was my inherent shyness, which was gradually starting to improve, and the second was that because I was severely short-sighted, my spectacles were a constant and necessary companion. But you can’t wear glasses on stage, of course, so I’d have to take them off and would set off blundering around on stage, missing marks, bumping into others, and perforce introducing a comedic aspect to the production where none was called for. (On one notable occasion, I went through an entire scene in Iolanthe – dressed as a fairy – wearing my forgotten glasses, provoking titters from the audience and a blasting from the director afterwards.) The teachers always suspected that I was doing this just to screw around, but at this point in my life I can truthfully say that in this, at least, I was quite innocent.
Singing in a choir at St. John’s didn’t end upon graduation, oh no; that would have been too easy. The alumni (called “Old Boys”) had a choir too, and so concerts, church performances and even stage musicals by the Old Johannian Choir were to follow. Participation in this, of course, was no longer compulsory, and I found myself drifting away from this over time, because I no longer wanted to sing in a choir or on the musical stage.
I wanted to be a rock musician.
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