I tend to describe myself as a 'self-taught' recorder player. I have come to suspect that this gives a seriously misleading understanding of my playing history. This note is meant to put the record straight.
I learned descant recorder in 'Infants School', which was then the name for what we now call Reception, Year One and Year Two, but from the age of seven to fifteen I never heard anyone else play the recorder. I carried on playing, alone in my bedroom, using my School Recorder Books Parts 1 and 2 which I'd kept, as well as a couple of songbooks from my parents' past (O wonderful 'Daily Express Community Song Book' - where are you now!) but not with the idea of 'practising'. I had heard of practising; it was something people learning to play the piano did; but pianos had all those key thingies - a recorder you just blow down, don't you. What's to practise?
More important, why? Well, why did I play at all? I was an only child - yes, I had friends, and yes I could talk to them and to my parents, but my recorder was much closer to me - much more of a BFF. I could say things to my recorder, and my recorder wouldn't judge me; and my recorder could say things to me and I wouldn't judge it. And if - er - a certain little black dog wandered in, my recorder and I together would scare it away when I couldn't do it alone. (It was - and is - a very little black dog compared with most of its kind.)
I and my recorder, we were friends - real friends - and we talked to each other like friends.
When I was ten, I began to wonder whether I should move on to a 'proper instrument' like, say, a flute; but fortunately it turned out to be far beyond what my parents could afford so I stayed with my recorder. Fortunately in another way too: neither I nor my parents realised that I would need to pay quite a lot of money to be taught the flute: after all, it's not like a piano, you don't need a teacher; you just blow down it. What's to learn?
But when I was eleven, we were on holiday in Harrogate, and we wandered into the Market. One of the stalls had (as far as I remember) a pretty random collection of books, magazines and such - and the 'School Recorder Book Part 3' caught my eye.
The School Recorder Book had a Part 3? Why hadn't I been told??
I bought it out of my holiday spending money. It hurt, but I daren't let it slip through my fingers - I might never see one again (and indeed, I never have).
And my eyes were opened! My descant was just a child-sized recorder - the proper recorder was the treble, and there was proper music for it - sonatas and fantasias, written by real composers!
I bullied my parents into buying me a treble recorder for Christmas that year, and it was wonderful. It played low notes! It played high notes without squeaking! I didn't completely abandon my descant friend, but we had a newcomer to our circle - a real recorder.
I learned to play at pitch, which wasn't difficult, but I soon got the hang of playing at the octave as well, which opened up a lot of songs that just went a pip or two too low for my descant. And I could play hymn tunes - this was long before I was a Christian, but my mother played the harmonium for the Women's Meeting at a local church so hymn books were around - and even the alto lines! It was a new world!
What it wasn't doing was practising. I never saw the need; there were a couple of mentions of practising in the SRB3, but no explanation, so I just ignored them. If I could play something I could play it; if I couldn't I couldn't. As far as I knew, that was it.
When I was fifteen I discovered that one of the other boys in my form (old-school for year) played descant like I had, and we got together a bit - he would play a hymn melody and I would play the next line down. We also found some odds and ends, like a minuet from Bach's Anna Magdalena Notenbuchlein - which we copied out and played - how and where we found them I really can't imagine, let alone remember.
This encouraged me to do a bit of digging in my local library - if I'd missed SRB3, what else had I missed? - and came across Rowland-Jones's contribution to the Cambridge Music series: just called 'The Recorder'. It was an outlier in the series: instead of assuming you were a player and just talking about repertoire, it actually took you from the very beginning of playing, and in particular it explained tonguing properly, it talked about shading and leaking to tune loud and quiet notes, and it revealed that the range was actually two and a half octaves, not two octaves and a lonely high G. This meant that my treble could talk to me much more; the full range, the various tonguings and the tuning of notes meant that my conversations with my recorders in the privacy of my bedroom could be so much more expressive - so much more comforting.
Finally, I went to university, and of course I took my recorders with me - I knew I would need someone to talk to. I didn't look for someone to play with - I knew exactly what most other people thought about recorders - but just played in my room; I and my recorders comforting each other. But I did start to make human friends, and I couldn't really hide my playing from them indefinitely - and not all of them sneered at me for not playing a proper instrument. And there was Blackwell's Music Shop, almost all of whose stock I couldn't possibly afford, but there was a Remainders Bin!
Who needs lunch anyway?
And there were concerts. Just a couple by recorder players, but the absolute top people. That really opened my eyes to what the recorder could do - and I began to realise that how I played wasn't actually that different in kind from how they played; in fact they did what I did but a thousand times better. I remember one particular concert by David Monrow, and one item that he played unaccompanied - it was a slow piece, that spoke to me like my recorders spoke to me, but it ended with a long decrescendo from mp-ish right down past pppp almost to niente; just the faintest gossamer thread of sound hung in the silence of a hundred held breaths.
Oh my oh my oh my.
So I was never going to be a real recorder player.
But I met Alison, who played flute - and even though I knew that a flute is a proper musical instrument she never said so, and we played duets. Mostly Telemann duets, rescued from the Blackwell's Remainders Bin. Usually they weren't difficult, so the fact that she was Grade 8 on a real instrument and I was completely untaught on an instrument far too trivial to have proper grades didn't matter; we just enjoyed playing together as we grew together. At least, I did, and she said she did.
And that was it, really.
So I've never practised - I haven't any real idea how. I m not really self-taught, because I've never taught myself anything. I do nowadays play music, but I still value my recorder most as a friend, and one that can talk to me, whisper to me, shout with me, be silent with me.
And still, if that little black dog sneaks in, my recorder protects me, and we drive it away together, as we always have. As friends do for each other.