If Music Be the Food of Love, I’m On a Diet

I went to my son’s school Music Evening tonight. It was scheduled early enough in the evening to be a logistical nightmare for anyone with younger children, but not late enough to make it easy for working parents to get to.

The result was that all the front rows of seats in the hall were taken up by a coterie of glossy, fragrant mums, freshly dressed in cool white linen separates, relaxing their perfect posture only sporadically in order to share a few conspiratorial laughs at other people’s expense. Shoe-horned in at the back with laptop bags the size of rucksacks, were the creased sweaty suits and creased sweaty brows of the working parents. As several of them tiptoed in during the head teacher’s opening address, the area at the back of the hall began to resemble a refugee camp. When the loud electronic beeping of a mobile started to emanate from the jacket of one poor sod, there was a collective swishing noise from the front rows, as manes of salon-straightened hair revolved in unison to register the owners’ tight-faced disapproval.

After the jolly music teacher had arranged the choir on stage, and persuaded all the small boys to remove their hands from their crotches, the music evening began.

There is something really lovely about hearing children sing together. Any little mistakes make the performance even better, somehow. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of children playing musical instruments. As one nervous child after another made his way up to the stage, the assembled parents were treated to a form of aural torture that ensured nobody would nod off.

After about half an hour I started wondering why music teachers always insist on putting a few popular tunes in the repertoire. I can guarantee that if any child played whole sections of Bach or Beethoven incorrectly, the majority of the audience (myself included) would remain blissfully unaware of his mistakes. Pity then, the little boy who had to play ‘Itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini’ on the violin. Perhaps it’s my fault, for just wanting to sit and tap my feet like a pensioner at a day centre, but as he valiantly see-sawed through the piece, each member of the audience started leaning slightly forward, willing the next screechy note to emerge on time, and not flat.

Back in the relative peace and quiet of my kitchen, I am relishing a cold glass of flinty, lemony Les Ruettes Sancerre (M&S about £9 a bottle, I think).

Thinking about tonight’s performance, I am wondering whether it was actually the audience that might have put the children off. Not only did the poor kids have to contend with the glare of laser-whitened teeth from the front row’s rictus grins, but they also had to block out the antics of the camcorder-wielding dads, who were busy reversing centuries of male competition by trying to see who had the smallest.