Originally posted by Serial_Apologist
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OK here goes then. 
I was very much brought up on light music alongside heavier classical stuff, largely from the classics and the romantics - this having been on the wireless, providing a background to my Mum's domesticities during school holidays, when it was often on the Light Programme, along with a good deal of similar sorts of music, much of it twee, that for me still epitomises the 1950s in an escapist, we're getting out of the woods now sort of way. It is Benjamin Frankel's "Carriage and Pair" from the 1950 British film "So Long at the Fair".
Each month The Big Issue contains an article in which some celebrity writes an essay on the "what would I tell my 16 year old self?" theme. This short piece, as well as one or two others, acted as a mental comfort blanket for me when I first attended boarding school at the age of nine. The way in which the piece sort of peters out in uncertainty at the end reflected my sense of unease at the breakdown of a previously safe home existence as a single child, and I was powerfully reminded of it and that particular time with a sudden strong lump in the throat when Radio 3 included it in a short series about British Light Music, which prompted discussion here on the forum. I don't remember ever having seen the film; it would be another three years before I first encountered rock 'n' roll, like so many others, in the shape of Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock", which only interested me in the two guitar breaks, thus ineluctably preparing me for my lifelong love of jazz improvisation, and another two before I started seriously engaging with "modern classical music" in the form of Sibelius's Second Symphony, which to my 14-year old ears sounded new, challenging and adventurous. It would be about another seven years before I found out that Benjamin Frankel also wrote radical contemporary music, as well as easily memorable film themes, when The Third Programme broadcast a performance of the tough serial Violin Concerto.
I was very much brought up on light music alongside heavier classical stuff, largely from the classics and the romantics - this having been on the wireless, providing a background to my Mum's domesticities during school holidays, when it was often on the Light Programme, along with a good deal of similar sorts of music, much of it twee, that for me still epitomises the 1950s in an escapist, we're getting out of the woods now sort of way. It is Benjamin Frankel's "Carriage and Pair" from the 1950 British film "So Long at the Fair".
Each month The Big Issue contains an article in which some celebrity writes an essay on the "what would I tell my 16 year old self?" theme. This short piece, as well as one or two others, acted as a mental comfort blanket for me when I first attended boarding school at the age of nine. The way in which the piece sort of peters out in uncertainty at the end reflected my sense of unease at the breakdown of a previously safe home existence as a single child, and I was powerfully reminded of it and that particular time with a sudden strong lump in the throat when Radio 3 included it in a short series about British Light Music, which prompted discussion here on the forum. I don't remember ever having seen the film; it would be another three years before I first encountered rock 'n' roll, like so many others, in the shape of Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock", which only interested me in the two guitar breaks, thus ineluctably preparing me for my lifelong love of jazz improvisation, and another two before I started seriously engaging with "modern classical music" in the form of Sibelius's Second Symphony, which to my 14-year old ears sounded new, challenging and adventurous. It would be about another seven years before I found out that Benjamin Frankel also wrote radical contemporary music, as well as easily memorable film themes, when The Third Programme broadcast a performance of the tough serial Violin Concerto.
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