{"id":175,"date":"2016-11-20T10:56:00","date_gmt":"2016-11-20T10:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jamesflint.net\/?p=175"},"modified":"2016-11-20T10:56:00","modified_gmt":"2016-11-20T10:56:00","slug":"2016-11-20-midland-melody","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jamesflint.net\/?p=175","title":{"rendered":"Midland Melody"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Shed has been quiet for a while. This is because I\u2019ve had my hands full of late with my new job, Head of Insight at a financial and business news start-up called  Curation Corporation<\/a>, and cranking out stories on the future of technology every day has kept me away from blogging. But my 50% funding level is in sight, and if I\u2019m going to hit that by Christmas (which would be nice), I need to get on it. So to that end I thought I\u2019d write something about\u2026 my mother.<\/p>\n

Some of you will know that my mum, n\u00e9e Marie Cooper, is an accomplished pianist, who began her career playing for the BBC. And in one of those peculiar coincidences that life is so fond of chucking at us, I recently discovered that over forty years ago she too had been involved in a creative project with \u201cMidland\u201d in the title.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year my wife unearthed a recording of one of mum\u2019s early sessions on the internet: performing \u201cMidland Melody\u201d with the BBC Midland Light Orchestra on the Light Programme, 7 December 1963, which would have been just two days before her 21st birthday.<\/p>\n

The clip is attached as a sound file, so you can hear Marie Cooper and her duet partner, Rosemary Brett Davies – with whom she played throughout her life and who later became my godmother – performing \u201cMidland Melody\u201d with the Harold Rich Quartet and the BBC Midland Light Orchestra, conducted by Jack Coles.<\/p>\n

Radio was different then. For one thing musicians were paid – in actual money, not just in airplay royalties or Spotify ad share revenues. The Musician\u2019s Union was still a powerful force in the land, powerful enough to enforce something called the \u201cNeedletime\u201d agreement which severely restricted the amount of records that the BBC was permitted to broadcast in any given period of time.<\/p>\n

In order to keep music flowing over the airwaves, the BBC therefore had to employ all variety of bands and orchestras to play live in their studios multiple times every day. Live performances were thus a staple of radio listening, and provided financial security to a thriving class of musicians up and down the country. You can read more about this era, and the role of the BBC Midland Light Orchestra in it,  here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Despite being taught clarinet and saxophone by one of my mum\u2019s friends from this era, a wonderful woodwind player called Lesley Cawdrey whose son  Julian is now a leading flautist<\/a>, I was never more than a middling musician. Whatever talent my mother possessed clearly skipped a generation – and landed with both feet in my daughters\u2019 genes, both of whom are keen violinists. My eight-year-old is, embarrassingly, already a better player than I ever managed to be, and is as good as her grandmother was at her age. Just two weeks ago I took the whole family to see the concert which marked the end of her first year with the National Children\u2019s Orchestra (ticket pictured below), so maybe she\u2019ll go on to make recordings of her own in years to come.  <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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Audio Block Double-click here to upload or link to a .mp3. Learn more The Shed has been quiet for a while. This is because I\u2019ve had my hands full of late with my new job, Head of Insight at a financial and business news start-up called  Curation Corporation, and cranking out stories on the future of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[21,29],"class_list":["post-175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","tag-midland","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jamesflint.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jamesflint.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jamesflint.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jamesflint.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jamesflint.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jamesflint.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jamesflint.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jamesflint.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jamesflint.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}