That the subject is music is almost irrelevant. For its theme is how we perceive what's going on around us, how we're conditioned to react from past experiences, and how new ones can awaken our senses.
Employing a lively narrative style, Caddy takes readers on a journey that begins in a ''character villa's'' open home, where she discovers a rare operatic score on a ''shiny black'' piano. But wait! There are no other scores in sight. Are the piano and the ''rare score'' there for show? Which makes Caddy wonder, ''Has classical music come to signify the pretensions of the wealthy?''
Thereafter follows a dozen or so chapters that take readers into musical nooks and crannies that will enlighten and perhaps frighten. Imagine a city (London in this case) where pianos are found scattered around under bridges, near landmarks and beauty spots for passers-by to tinker on. Imagine it happening in Dunedin (can't wait!). Or a concert in which the conductor enters the hall, sits on a chair, and asks the audience to ''listen'' to the music around them: coughing, shuffling feet, lolly papers being unwrapped, etc.
And concert halls? Do they, Caddy asks, ''Promote a healthy musical environment and help us on our way towards a genuine and imaginative encounter with music?'' From personal local experience, I'd say, ''Yes, provided you can find a park within a reasonable walking distance of the hall.'' But as Caddy points out, concert halls are dark, closed places where an audience is conditioned to sit tight, not squirm, and programmed to applaud on cue; and anyway, concert halls weren't invented until the 1860s and compositions prior to then were meant to be performed in palaces, churches etc.
Since this never occurred to me, reading How to Hear Classical Music has been a significant learning experience. But I'll probably still be a stick-in-the-mud as far as ''hearing'' the classics is concerned. If Caddy guest-lectures down this end of the island (she's a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland's music department), I'll probably go for the humour as much as the insights. She sure knows how to inform entertainingly.
- Ian Williams is a Dunedin writer and composer.
