It was a big change from Remuera this Kaipara tidal creek with the hills crowding close, the mangroves and extensive mud-flats at low tide, yet this was Rick’s chosen retreat. A house, a small jetty, a collection of farm sheds, and a large parcel of dry-stock land that he had let for grazing. His disastrous ’never again’ marriage was now history and he had retired here at fifty-one to lick his wounds, to write poetry, do some fishing and, if possible, set his poetry to music. He was an adequate cellist and a better-than-average sight-reader but he had never tried his hand at composition.
The house was late eighteen hundreds, kauri built and solid, built on the river flat when water was the only roadway but in these times it was thirteen gates below the present ridge road. For its first sixty odd years, it had functioned without electricity. Power had not come to the district until the early nineteen fifties and for the first eighteen months of his occupancy it had again been without power. The transformer had been there on the pole, one assumed forgotten by the power company, the line to it still alive. All that it had needed was for the drop-outs to be closed but he had been opting for the simple life.
If he found that he couldn’t hack it, he would see about getting connection but, in the meantime, he would live out of tins, on fish when he caught any, on illegal oysters, with fresh meat, fresh bread, his mail and newspapers on the odd occasions when he went into town. He had the woodrange and a pressure lamp and could manage without fridge or washing machine, without radio, and most definitely without television. After all, the original owners had managed. The telephone was also not reconnected and never would be. He had come to take a rather dim view of the very thing that had made his fortune, electrical technology.
His father and grandfather had both been electrical engineers and successful businessmen, the firm nationally and even internationally known. He had followed them into electrical engineering but had never aquired their business acumen and knew it. He had sold the firm when it eventually came to him.
His grandfather’s library had contained the yearbooks of The Institute of Electrical Engineers from 1920 onwards and the American Institute from the late 1930s. In both cases, they were bound copies of The Institutes’ weekly magazines with as-it-happened accounts of advances and high- lighting the then current attitudes. From them one could believe that when Great Britain was finally fully reticulated, had a national grid and common electrical standards, the Golden Age must arrive.
The first reliable trans-Atlantic radio links, mail planes catapulted from ocean liners, news pictures by wire, sound on discs linked to film by Selsyns and, soon after, sound on the film itself, the growth of radio broadcasting and networks, these and so many other things were expected to add to the sum of human wellbeing and happiness. Public radio was going to be a force for education, a mine of information in every household, and the same was said for television when it was still on the distant horizon.
Starting in his high-school years, Rick had read through every one of these volumes and had been caught up in the apparent adventure of building a better world. It was only in more recent times that he had come to see that the world was not noticeably better or more happy: that the world had a marvellous ability to misuse every advance of technology and not just in warfare. FM stereo had become the preserve of banal DJ’s chatter and cretinous forgettable music. Television was even more anti-intellectual and the use of colour and high-definition could do nothing to allay this. On the wide screen with its overwhelming surround-sound , the warning ‘contains course language, explicit sex, and violence’ was almost standard. And literature was no longer literary unless it made liberal use of the copulative adjective. Jaded entertainment palates seemed to require ever higher levels of sleaziness, graphic gore, and shock.
In spite of this, Rick was willing to concede that there were still a few things of value being produced, even in the field of pop music, but he felt that the bulk of popular culture had as much lasting potential as a disposable tissue. He despaired of it. In three or four hundred years would anyone of today have the stature of Buxtehude or Bach or of Milton and John Donne.
Now there was someone whom Rick admired, Donne! A real all-rounder who had shared in the successful foray against the Spanish fleet at Cadiz, taken part in the abortive expedition to waylay the returning Spanish gold fleet in the Azores and, after several distinct periods as a Member of Parliament, taken holy orders to finally become the Dean of St. Pauls. And through it all, writing some of the world’s most memorable poetry in both English and Latin. Donne didn’t need a word processor and he was the one whose poetry Rick would most like to emulate with several of the Victorians in second place.
It happened that Rick wrote very little poetry in his ‘retirement’ and had not been alone for long. A musical friend had written on behalf of an acquaintance who was running out of time to complete a ballet score and needed to get out of everyone’s reach for a week or so. ‘Would Rick mind giving him some space?’ He had said ‘yes’ never guessing what it would lead to. The acquaintance had arrived with a piano on the back of a pick-up and had left several weeks later while Rick was out fishing leaving a note of apology and the piano. One must assume that he expected to be back as he was on a number of subsequent occasions. The piano had remained there and another had joined it.
Because he had let one come, there had been another and then still others, eventually three or four at once, mostly musicians, male and female, with and without commissions, and the odd writer. Rick took most of them fishing with him at one time or another and it was a continual source of wonder to him that they seemed to be able to write music in their heads while waiting for a bite. Not just the melodic line but the chord structures and clever modulations into other keys. They could be so far away that they missed bites.
From the start there had had to be house rules. Rick could make no charge. To charge would make the place a guest house and various agencies would have immediately poked their noses in. Expenses must be shared, everyone had to contribute to the common food pool, clean up after themselves, take their turn at cooking and chopping the firewood, helping with the other chores, and they had to remember that other people might want to sleep. Although, if anyone was seriously running out of time on a commission these responsibilities could be waived. They could even be temporarily anti-social if they wished. The others would be understanding.
Composition came first but it was not all work and high-flown discussion. There was a continual barrage of infantile tricks, mud fights, boisterous play, and intense card games where the better cheat won. “Just don’t wreck the place,” Rick would say.
Although Rick had insisted that there should never be any additional cost to himself, he had converted one of the sheds into living accommodation cum studio, the power had been reluctantly restored, and a freezer, fridge, and washing machine acquired. Electric lighting did make sense in a wooden house that was 17 kilometres and 13 gates from the nearest fire station. There had already been one near miss with a candle. But still no radio or television and cell-phones were banned when they became popular.
He had come to see himself as the main one to benefit. There was never a shortage of intellectual conversation and he had become part of a floating chamber group the composition of which depended on who was in residence at the time. His outlook had expanded. His taste in poetry and music had come to include living poets and living composers. His appreciation of so-called serious music had previous not developed beyond the Classical Romantics and certainly not beyond the end of the 19th century. But now, constantly surrounded by those who were seeking through their work to extend the boundaries, the once-discordant noise of Modernists and even of Minimalists began to make sense and even to please.
He attended the premiers of new works conjured by his friends by then knowing them intimately by their constant iteration, their painful editing, and the family discussion that had surrounded them. He was even persuaded, somewhat against his will, to give the first public performance of a cello sonata of the type that he would once have scorned as ‘cats fighting.’ Now it made sense. That was how far he had come.
He was attending more concerts and becoming more involved in live music than he had ever thought possible. His hospitality was reciprocated with invitations to concerts and to stay, there was always a bed waiting for him, some of them in other countries. And he was being introduced as a fellow musician to some well known names on the music scene including top artistes from overseas. His effort to explain that he was a mere rank amateur tended to be brushed aside as modesty.
The invitations meant that he was often away from home, sometimes for weeks at a time, but he could trust those in residents to look after themselves and hopefully not do too much damage. His bank took care of the regular bills and, in the unlikely event that there was no-one there, the farmer who had the grazing would keep an eye on the place.
He found it embarrassing, the fuss that was made of him. He had done nothing really. Provided a retreat and a bit of encouragement at times. Made the odd suggestion that, amazingly, often seemed to work. But nothing more! It was true that some landmark works had been composed under his roof but he, himself, could claim no part of their creation.
Then, far from home in Cincinnati, Rick’s host had had the public radio channel playing Saint Paul Sunday at low volume in the background and Rick’s ears had pricked up on hearing a familiar work, a recent quartet of one of his own gang of lay-abouts. It appeared that they were known as the Kaipara School which was certainly news to Rick. It was also claimed that they were taking music in valuable new directions and that he, Richard Crozier, was their mentor: a regular Nadia Boulanger.
Where on earth did they get HIS name from? It just went to show how wrong people could get things.