Ilkley Baptist

I often look in charity shops for books or CDs. There's seldom anything I want, but you can't rule out the possibility of a wonderful find if you don't look. Today, in Oxfam in Otley, I hit gold. Along with some piano pieces by Hamish MacCunn, Solfeggietto by CPE, and Brahms' Waltzes, there was Gay but Wistful! How about that?

Not impressed? Gay but Wistful is a piece by Percy Grainger, one of the movements of his In a Nutshell Suite (the others are the wonderfully named, Arrival Platform Humlet, Pastoral, and Gumsuckers March). I didn't know a piano version existed, and certainly haven't seen it for sale. Grainger's music is not easy to find. Here, though, is a charming, halting song in a 'popular London style' such as might be heard at the stage shows of George Grossmith, apparently.

It's typical Grainger. Chords are to be wrenched, certain notes 'to the fore,' others trumpet like or harp like, smooth or detached (assiduously avoiding Italian terms), and there's considerable use to be made of the middle pedal; which I don't have.

The MacCunn is nice; terribly sentimental, but with charm and a genuinely Scottish flavour. The Brahms Waltzes I don't think I've got already - certainly haven't played them in years. Solfeggietto is for Joe to have a go at. Oh, I also found a book version of Feynman's famous physics lectures from Caltech. A pretty good day.

Opus 34 is the Piano Quintet, and I fulfilled a long-held ambition recently, when I played two of its movements as part of a chamber music group, this week.

Playing the piano is an immediately satisfying thing - you produce the whole piece of music yourself. But it's lonely. You generally make music alone. I've long wanted to play with other musicians and, through the kindness of a friend, was recently introduced to a group of local amateur musicians. The pianist was happy to move over for two of the movements and let me have my first go at doing this sort of thing. It was wonderful. Exciting, challenging, tense and joyful all at once.

And what a piece to start with! Brahms' Piano Quintet is a piece I've known since my teens. It's one of Brahms' unruly early works that, like the First Piano Concerto, didn't easily find its best form. It is a powerful, complex and rich piece. I played for the two inner movements, the slow second, and the driving Scherzo. That's an incredibly exciting movement, with relentless rhythms breaking into emphatic march-like tunes, and a middle section (Trio I suppose, though it's not in triple time) that contains one of those typically Brahmsian broad tunes. Mellowness multiplied.

It's many weeks since I started thinking to Beethoven's Late Quartets. I have been listening and thinking on and off through the summer, but this is a heavyweight subject and I haven't had anything to say.

A small thought occurs, though. I was interested to read about Beethoven's own studies. He knew Bach's music since as a boy he was taught the 48, but seems to have returned to study it deeply later in life. Many of his late works contain fugues, and he became a master of this form which Bach had so developed. In addition, he became interested in 'the songs of the monks' - plainsong - and modal music. This is present in the Late Quartets, in Op. 132. This music looks back several centuries, as well as, in other places (the Grosse Fuge) anticipating music that would not be written until the following century.

The thought is that Beethoven was here grappling with the limits of music itself, with tonality and the capabilities of expression. There is an I-thou encounter to be had between artist and material (as WH Vanstone suggests occurs between God and us). Until recent times the word 'great' has been thrown around in absurd ways by those speaking of painters and musicians. What on earth does it mean, except that I and my friends approve of this 'great' music above all that third-rate stuff? Well, perhaps it might mean, properly used, that at times artists push the boundaries of themselves, their material, and the tradition of their artform. At these rubbing points there are discoveries to be made. Art is not just self-expression, but encounter.

The impatience of traditionalists with conceptual art, that it does not include craftsmanship or craftswomanship, may have a point in that the limits of materials can be part of the creative process.

My first thought on the Late Quartets of Beethoven is that they sound very good! In Terry Pratchett's Discworld there is a person (the supreme governor of Ankh Morpork, I think) who reads music. He doesn't need to listen to it, indeed would rather not have some musicians' interpretation interfering with his pleasure, he simply sits down and reads it, hearing the music in his head. Having sat down with the score of the Late Quartets and looked at them, picked out the tunes on the piano, and read a discussion of the pieces, remembering the tunes the writer was referring to, I have to say that hearing the music is essential.

The sound is so much more than the memory or the imagination. It is alive and full of rich presence. It is far more powerful than the idea of the sound. I can read about the movement, study the score and hear it in my head, but when I play the recording it becomes real.

Is this like telling someone you love them? They know, of course, but hearing it counts. We might watch a film we've seen before. We know the story, but we can't have the emotional experience unless we follow it through again. In prayer and worship we rehearse very well know things - God is love, there is hope - but it's not about knowing them, but taking them into ourselves, and that means having them actually turn up for us to engage with.

I first got to know Beethoven's late quartets when I was a teenager. (I was a little strange in those days, and am only now, after so many years growing up, becoming truly peculiar.)

The version I got to know in those days, on vinyl, is by the Quartetto Italiano. Beautiful playing - very posh and sumptuous. This year I bought a new version by the Takacs Quartet, which has been receiving top reviews. The difference is considerable. The Takacs relish the sudden lurching shifts from sublime melody to bouncy ditty without any apology. They emphasise the changing colours and varied pace of the music; there seems a lot more to hear. The QI version left no doubt that this is great music. The Takacs force you to ask why it is great, and what place the fun tunes play in greatness.

So I've bought a listening guide and a score, and am going to listen as hard as I can and track the shape and progression of these pieces. I may even try to paint a picture or diagram of them. Whatever the label great means when applied to a work of art, it represents a claim that intense attention will never be wasted.

The Comedian Harmonists were a German group that were hugely successful between 1927 and 1934. They sang folk songs, popular songs and arrangements of other music, including jazz and light classical music. Their gimmick was to not only sing any words there may have been, but to immitate instruments with their voices. In some pieces that is all they did.

I discovered them recently. They were wonderful musicians, and there is something irresistible about such a light hearted approach to music making. Also, you listen harder, hearing the sounds of trumpet or saxophone copied by a person, and appreciate it all the more.

I used one of their pieces in church last Sunday. Creole Love Call is a well known jazz piece, but would have just been recorded by Duke Ellington when the Comedian Harmonists did their version of it. And there's a point to be made about the extra power that is often given to music when it is transcribed. As there is to scripture when it is 'performed' in a sermon, or the good news when it is played out in our lives.