Notes about Notes

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Concert March: BLACK VEN

As a new venture … writing a short piece in a popular style, for a Band that I have never heard, in a place I have never visited, without the players having the least idea what I was doing … is a curious undertaking. My interest with regard to Lyme Regis, apparently one of the sweetest spots on the English Coast, famous for its fossils, a very short visit from that queen of the English novel, Jane Austen, and scenes of serious derring-do during the Civil War (I think), started with a small piece of rice paper in the family bible left by former generations. It detailed, in a rough and ready way, generations of a family surnamed 'Dunster', beginning in 1781 in Lyme Regis, but then petering out without there being any apparent connection to my own family... except that the Dunster name appears as the middle name of many generations of Snells.

One or two other scraps of hearsay cast other shadows across the story, until I managed to piece the bits into a whole, and lo-and-behold, there stood ranks of Dunsters connecting directly into my own-name ancestors. And not just them, but the Bennetts of Lyme, the Thomases, the Govises …… and so on. The conductor's note in the score tells enough of the rest, as follows...

"While following two interests of mine … boats and family history … I was led to the small seaside town of Lyme Regis. Not only is Lyme famous for being itself, it shelters a notable Boat Building School, and long ago it nurtured a family that led indirectly into my own. Apart from the strong possibility of directly descended Dunsters still living in Lyme Regis, they were, from the late eighteenth, through the nineteenth, and into the early part of twentieth centuries, an interesting and varied succession of people.

But it was the boats that first caught my attention, in particular Black Ven, a beautiful racing gig named after the local coastal promontory, to the east of the town. Built at the Boat School by Gail McGarva, and shaped entirely by her boatbuilder’s eye, no soulless, know-all computer blurred or averaged out her vision. See it and marvel at the skills of our ancestors reborn.

However, Lyme Regis has yet another element essential to civilised life: a Town Band. So it was the merest step for me to think of writing a concert piece for them: a musical doffing of the cap to the boat, the hill, my forbears, and to the Lyme Regis Town Band, as the latter entertains its audiences at their regular Summer Concerts. The tapping of hammers, the sound of sawing, a ship’s bell, and a repeated snatch of “Row, row, row, your boat”, all anchor the March firmly on the side of pleasing and amusing the listener, without detaining him or her for too long, and never, ever, seriously."

The conductor PHILIP HARPER, leading a training day for the Lyme Regis Town Band, tried out the piece, and said that "it went down a storm" and that he couldn't get "the tune" out of his head.

Concert March: BLACK VEN... intended for and playable by Fourth Section Bands, and any other Band interested in an unusual, but listener-friendly piece... is now on sale, priced £26.50