In a message dated 3/9/2016 4:36:16 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
George Martin
For the record, when George Martin was six, his family acquired a piano
that sparked his interest in music, rather than furniture.
At eight years of age, Martin persuaded his parents, Henry and Betha
Beatrice (Simpson) Martin, that he should take piano lessons, but those ended
after only eight lessons because of a disagreement between his mother and the
teacher.
The disagreements were implicatural in nature and usually brought about by
some disimplicature by Mrs. Martin:
-- Late again?
-- Finished so soon?
-- You don't like Debussy?
-- I do like the lamp on the piano.
In a way it reminds one of Noel Coward, but he brought his own implicatures
with him. His piano teacher started his one and only lesson with a lecture
on Ebeneezer Prout.
"He went on to explain that a gentleman called Ebeneezer Prout had
announced many years ago that consecutive fifths were wrong and must in no
circumstances be employed. At that time Ebeneezer Prout was merely a name to me
(as a matter of fact he still is, and a very funny one at that) and I was
unimpressed by his Victorian dicta. I argued back that Debussy and Ravel used
consecutive fifths like mad. My instructor waved aside this triviality with
a pudgy hand, and I left his presence for ever with the parting shot that
what was good enough for Debussy and Ravel was good enough for me."
After that, Martin explained that he had just picked it up by himself --
i.e. piano, figuratively, alla Grice, to mean, piano playing.
As a child George Martin attended several schools, including a convent
school in Holloway, St. Joseph's in Highgate, and St Ignatius's in Stamford
Hill, to which he won a scholarship.
When war broke out and St. Ignatius students were evacuated to Welwyn,
Martin's family left London and he was enrolled at Bromley.
Martin remembered well "the very first time [he] heard a symphony
orchestra. I was just in my teens when Sir Adrian Boult brought the BBC
Symphony
Orchestra to [St. Ignatius] for a public concert. It was absolutely magical.
Hearing such glorious sounds I found it difficult to connect them with
ninety men and women blowing into brass and wooden instruments or scraping away
at strings with horsehair bows."
This may require a Popperian explanation. Whatever Boult conducted
belonged, in a way, to what Popper would call w2 -- But Martin is referring to
his
'difficult[y]' in linking w2 then to "ninety men and women blowing into
brass and wooden instruments or" (Martin uses a disjunction here) "scraping
away at strings with horsehair bows" -- Popper's w1.
Despite Martin's continued interest in music, and "fantasies about being
the next Rachmaninov", he did not initially choose music as a career.
The intially, Griceian reader, implicates he later will.
Martin worked briefly as a quantity surveyor and then for the War Office
as a Temporary Clerk (Grade Three) which meant filing paperwork and making
tea -- "in that order" -- cfr. Grice, "Be orderly". (Under Grice, "be
informative", perhaps the brand of tea should be mentioned?)
In 1943, when George Martin was seventeen, he joined the Fleet Air Arm of
the Royal Navy"
as Grice had done 2 years before.
"and became an aerial observer and a commissioned officer. The war ended
before Martin was involved in any combat,"
like Grice who was involved in the North-Atlantic theatre of operations
before being transferred to the Admiralty, and retiring as a captain.
"and he left the service in 1947."
"Encouraged by Sidney Harrison (a member of the Committee for the Promotion
of New Music) Martin used his veteran's grant to attend the Guildhall from
1947 to 1950, where he studied piano and oboe -- in that order -- and was
interested in the music of Rachmaninov and Ravel, as well as Cole Porter.
-- of "Let's do it" fame.
It's a small world: Martin's oboe teacher was Margaret Eliot (the mother of
Jane Asher, who would later become involved with Paul McCartney).
On 3 January 1948 — while still at Guildhall — Martin married Sheena
Chisholm, with whom he had two children, Alexis and Gregory Paul Martin.
He later married Judy Lockhart-Smith and they also had two children, Lucie
and Giles Martin.
He would refer to his four children as "the fab four".
Cheers,
Speranza
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