Dialogue: No sax please, if you want to be a neighbour of mine

By DON DONOVAN*

Being one of that multitude of music lovers who can neither read a score nor play any instrument, I have always paid perhaps unwarranted homage to just about anybody who can.

That being the case, I was surprised to read, in Quentin Crisp's New York diary, Resident Alien, that he was a self-declared "sworn enemy of music." I suppose my astonishment was heightened because I would have expected the Naked Civil Servant - who unashamedly displayed the exhibitionistic instincts of both a peacock and a peahen - to have loved and embraced aspects of all of the arts, painting, sculpture, literature and music.

It was his blanket statement that music is "the most noise conveying the least information" that really caught my attention because it made no concession whatsoever to any type of music.

I could understand it if he had said that he loathed pop but liked the classics, or hated Schoenberg but adored Mozart but, no, he rubbished the whole gamut from penny whistle to Royal Philharmonic. Indeed, at the age of 86, Crisp claimed to have been to only one concert in his life.

Only a week before I read Resident Alien, I had been fascinated by the story of Greg Smith, cellist of the Auckland Symphony Orchestra whose neighbour had called in the noise abatement mafia from the council, complaining that she could no longer stand his intrusive practising.

It seemed a monstrous complaint, especially when he appeared before us on the television as a likeable, inoffensive sort of chap with sad eyes, a wry wit and long, bony fingers built for caressing a finger board rather than sticking up at the neighbours.

I felt for him not only for his culture but his evident charitable willingness to cast the pearls of his talent before the people of Auckland (from whose symphony orchestra he's hardly likely ever to accumulate enough wealth to feature in the rich list).

I don't mind admitting that I bristled and my instinct was to consign the carping and troublesome woman to a heap of philistines. How could anybody object to the sounds of a cello, especially in the hands of a professional?

But upon reflection, and putting aside Quentin Crisp, Greg Smith and the querulous neighbour altogether, I have come to acknowledge that what to one person might be a celestial arpeggio could quite easily, to another, be hell.

Pursuing a there's-always-two-sides-to-a-story reasonability, I remembered that for all my love of good music, my mother hated violins. She said they sounded like cats in torment and would rush to turn off the wireless whenever she heard one.

I don't ever recall any similar aversion to the cello but perhaps if she had heard one played in high register through thin walls, she might have threatened the safety of a Greg Smith.

My father, too, had a pet musical aversion. Once when I played him a recording of Laurindo Almeida per-forming classical Spanish guitar solos, he growled, "he's playing to himself, that joker," in the disdainful way that I now dismiss the exponents of modern dance.

In my parents' case, as distinct from the all-encompassing condemnation of Quentin Crisp, they applied selective prejudices. Much as Mum loathed the unaccompanied violin, she was unlikely to remain dry-eyed at the strains of Mantovani. And the sound of a full-blooded brass band or Harry Mortimer's rendering of Trumpet Voluntary on Sunday morning listeners' requests brought Dad swiftly to attention.

Much as I love the cello, I confess that there's one instrument I abhor. It's the solo saxophone, a nauseating mongrel of a thing neither woodwind nor brass. It wails and it moos and if it weren't for Cleo Laine, I would have thrown those old Johnny Dankworth LPs away.

Even if I still can't understand Crisp's antipathy, I've come to see Greg Smith's neighbour's point of view. Poor suffering soul.

And if Greg Smith decides to give up the cello and take up the sax, he'd better not move into a flat that's next door to anywhere I might be living. If he does, one spit down its reed and I'll have the council's noise mafia around so fast that he won't know whether he's upstrung or brass-bound.

* Don Donovan is an Auckland freelance writer.