A Note For You Roger Green
E
arlier in the year I offered a talk (A Note For You) to the RSMs on the subject of my compositions for piano. In the course of playing and speaking I shared some of the influences on me, my musical heroes. Libby has kindly asked me to write something about those wonderful folk. I have to start with Miss Flowers. That was how I knew her. Several teachers at my Primary school dabbled with aspects of music but the main exposure to music came in the form of broadcasts from the BBC, “Time and Tune” etc.. Several classes would collect in the main hall where a single loudspeaker would ‘spray’ the music over us as we danced and sprang around the hall in response. And then came Miss Flowers. She was young and full of life. She exuded music and I fell in love with her and her music. She brought groups together to sing and to play and the whole school was caught in the whirlwind of her musical activity. She encouraged me hugely, giving me the confidence to write down some of the ideas that I had in my head and to arrange others for the new school band. I had been sent to piano lessons and was also learning the cornet in the local Salvation Army band, but Miss Flowers’ music made all that come alive and fly. She had an ability to discover and nurture talent even in those who were unaware that they had any. Even the most unlikely members of my class were influenced by Miss Flowers and I owe her so much. Many years later I discovered that Miss Flowers, so full of life and enthusiasm, had died tragically young. I could not believe it. It was Evelyn Flowers who persuaded my parents that I should enter for a scholarship to Trinity College of Music. And so she was responsible for introducing me to my next musical hero, Gladys Puttick. I remember the audition. I was more than nervous. There sat Miss Puttick, slightly rotund, grey haired with a bun, benign and beaming as she so often did. And so for a significant period of years I was a student in her Musicianship Class. What an influence she had on young children, from often unpromising backgrounds in London and the Home Counties. She knew intimately of a world of music
because she lived in it. Her life was saturated with music and she shared it generously.
Gladys had been a student of Yorke Trotter at the London College of Music and her method followed his principles. Her teaching was centred on improvising and composing. She was the finest improviser that I have ever met. I have seen her sit and improvise a fugue. Very few can manage that. She believed that music can be ‘caught’ rather than ‘taught’ in the early years and how right she was. As a student you were not always conscious of what you were learning or indeed that you were learning at all. Gladys used music from a wide range of styles and sources in the classical repertoire and she enabled it all to come alive and become such an important part of me. Trinity and Gladys were the perfect foil for music at school. The Grammar school and John Turner, Director of Music, offered music worked out on paper whereas Gladys Puttick offered music lived in the moment. At school four bar phrases abounded and Dr William Lovelock ruled supreme with the eleventh commandment being, “Thou shalt not write consecutive fifths”. Both appealed hugely and in very different ways as aspects of the same thing. Both would probably have suffered without the other. The final influence upon me, shared in my talk, is slightly unusual as I never met him and he never taught me in person, although I believe that he taught me so much through his music. Oddly also, whereas I suspect few RSMs will have any knowledge of Miss Flowers or Miss Puttick, I suspect that quite a few will recognise the name of Walter Carroll who became Music Adviser to Manchester Education Committee in 1918.
rsma newsletter september 2019 page 11