Hooked by chance

I know we’re all supposed to be taking advantage of the new technologies and listening to whatever we fancy on the radio whenever we like. But I reckon you have to be under 25 to really get the hang of listening by download, podcast and stream rather than at the switch of a button. When, in any case, are we supposed to find the time to download it all and catch up with what we’ve missed? It’s like the conveyor belt in The Generation Game. By the time you realise you’ve missed something vital and/or desirable, the next week’s goodies are on offer. That’s why I’m still a switch-it-on-and-see-what’s-on listener, for most of the time. Chance, serendipity, happenstance are much more interesting than anything preplanned.

Last week in the car I happened upon Ruth Wall playing a specially adapted Scottish harp live in the studio for Sean Rafferty’s In Tune on Radio 3. It sounded so odd, a bit oriental in its staccato, bell-like clarity and yet too rhythmical to be from the East. What on earth was it? A John Cage piece for ‘prepared piano’, which Wall plays on the harp by blocking the strings with rubber bands, hairbands, Blu-tack, ‘anything that works’. I was hooked — especially when Wall went on to play Peter Maxwell Davies’s ‘Farewell to Stromness’. He wrote it out of anger when the Orkneys were under threat from a mining company keen to make money out of its uranium deposits. But it doesn’t sound angry; more like a spirited sea dashing against a rocky shoreline. For a while the humid heat inside the stationary car evaporated and I was walking along a windblown cliff, underneath a steely sky.