Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 21 - 27 September 2000 Issue No. 500
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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David Blake Cormorant come home Does anybody here remember Vera Lynn? Profile by Khaled Abdallah

'It was not anecdotal but they seemed to be ripped right off the canvas only to come floating, warm, material and deeply committed through the air...'

David Blake is Al-Ahram Weekly's longest-running columnist and best-known (not to mention only) music critic, but he is not a man for profiles. "I hate the idea of having myself spread all over the paper. I don't want to be skinned. I don't want to be scraped dry like a kipper." And then "I truly don't want to be profiled and I don't want to be made show of. There are plenty of people who deserve it more than I. Why don't you profile Mr __ or Mrs __? They are more worthy."

And yet here we are. After coaxing, comforting and battles, Mr Blake has made his way, like all those who deserve it, to the penultimate page of this paper; and so the greatest of greats have been kept on hold. The picture is big and beautiful, raw in that black and white way, but measured with a touch of softness, and yet beaming with that ever-present glare of importance inescapable in big pictures. To say the least, it's a marked improvement on the new picture that accompanies Mr Blake's weekly article. Anyway, how many people can say they have taken up nigh on half a page of any paper with the fine features of their face, beautiful or otherwise? Not many.

But as I sit here at my computer, about to kipper-ise Mr Blake, I'm inclined to ask myself a few questions forced upon me by the moment (event?). What is a profile for? Is it a means of recognition? A stop-off point on the way to Who's Who? A slightly higher form of tabloid mannerism? Is it our job to entertain or pay tribute? And can this really be called a summarised biography? What does it matter and who cares? The questions are not worth asking. To my knowledge, few books or papers have taken as their subject so neglected a field as the ontology of profile-writing, and rightly so.

But then again, Mr Blake with his nimble feet has caused a paradigm shift in the austere world of comments on smiles and foibles, a world full of people prone to make meaningful shifts in chairs, make wonderfully idiosyncratic gestures and take unmissable pulls on cigarettes -- the profile world, in other words. Al-Ahram Weekly has turned in on itself.

To cut a protracted story short, this doesn't happen often and this profile is not the product of a prearranged 12.30pm meeting in a place of convenience. This writer has witnessed Mr Blake perform so many different meaningful shifts in chairs that it has become impossible to decipher a pattern worth listening to. Safe to say, he does not smoke, but, on the other hand, his gestures are a beautifully unconscious part of his character.

Mr Blake calls himself "a loner in the big sense. I like very much to have people around me, see them, talk to them, but I feel that overall one is one, one is one, one is one." Perhaps, therefore, for all who know David Blake, there is a certain mystique about him; at once both dusky and colourful.

First of all, let us be thoroughly unprofessional. David Blake is a pen name. Before joining the paper in 1992, David Blake was Frank Brown. Now, of course, he has the right to use those sacred letters, "aka." Beyond that, one wonders how Frankie, his preferred name, came to live here in Egypt. However much we Egyptians are proud of our nation, being born in Sydney of Australian parents with a Norwegian / Yorkshire background has rarely implied life and work in Cairo, especially as a music critic.

Though there is no directly proportional relationship between the years to a person and how interesting s/he is, at 84, whether he likes it or not, Frank is part of that unique club of octogenarians, hand-picked by Fate, who have witnessed the virtual whole of what everyone reading this article still considers his century -- apologies to those who have acclimatised to the term 21st century without thinking of Buck Rogers. He must have seen something worth relating. Add to that his character, musical knowledge and constant desire to sit nowhere but in the last row of the opera house's stalls, and we have something on our hands.

Now don't get me wrong; Frank is no secret agent or iridescent stone, even if he does think of life as a mirage. It is just that there are certain things "one," in the numerical sense, keeps to oneself and which, because "one" isn't famous, not everyone knows about. "I don't want to be made a laughing stock of," I have running through my head. "I'll do my best," was my reply.

For Frank, "music is the thing." It is what he calls "my religion," and in key with his creed he believes that those who can take it to its divine heights are "anointed beings, not like other people. They are trying to express an immortal message through the most ineffable of mediums. Imagine just sitting down at this horrible thing, the piano, it looks dreadful, made of wood and steel. It can evoke anything, so can the fiddle. How is it that Artur Schnabel or Mitsuko Uchida do what they do? They have an ability to feel and produce beyond the note." And so as David Blake keeps suggesting throughout his articles, "You don't get angry with musicians. You have to be very kind to them. Treat them well."

His mother had it in her to be a concert pianist. Taught by the great 19th-century piano teacher with a musical bloodline down to Beethoven, Theodore Leschensky, she would have become a pianist if it were not for the time's social mores. "My aunt Edith and great-aunt noticed her musicality and took her secretly to Leschensky, who was well known for being especially gifted at teaching women." But eventually her father learned "the hideous truth," that she was planning to play in public, and forbade her from doing so. "It wasn't the done thing. It was beyond the pale; you were a whore, slashing about in beautiful clothes if you played the piano in public. Think of Wanda Landowska -- the father used to hit her -- 'you can't play in public,' he would say. And yet she became the best Bach player ever."

And so, did Frank Brown ever aspire to being a musician? "No, never. I never aspired to it. I don't have the character. I would have collapsed." His mother, a "very strong-willed woman," told him that he didn't have it. The body wouldn't allow it; the synaptic circuit running directly from brain to finger was absent. "I don't have it," he says, demonstrating by banging his head with his hand then delving into the table between us, fingers poised.

"It is a rather sad aspect of music that so much of it can be taught but that the essentials, the things that create the revelation, cannot be. The strange deep divers of music produce the one aspect of it impossible to talk about, the one that removes them from reality. The places they mark are the dates and times of one's life."

His first such impression was a pianist, Leopold Godowsky, "who after all these years still haunts me. His tone has echoed and made circles. For example, the Chopin Berceuse he played was like Titian's painting of the mother and child. It was not anecdotal but they seemed to be ripped right off the canvas only to come floating, warm, material and deeply committed through the air, becoming almost the feelings of the two entities intertwined but passing through one like a mist of elaborate aural embroidery that was heart-stopping."

Yet Mr Blake describes himself as "merely a highly tuned listener -- one of many who fill the concert halls and opera houses of the world. We make a sort of cabal living on the underbelly of music."

But how did he come to join the critic's circle? Where did the knowledge come from? He was never really a musicologist, even if he did study orchestration at Dartington Hall just before the war.

Frank came from a musical family with the means to allow music surround them in an age separate from our age of the CD. At breakfast, concerts would be discussed. One uncle was a superb organist; an aunt, a wonderful pianist. His maternal grandparents were at the first ever Salzburg Festival with Mahler conducting. He himself has seen almost all the last century's great legends; a number in person, all in concert. Mary Gardiner, one of Schoenberg's pupils, was his piano teacher. "I learned music from the foot. My family would say, if you want to come to this or that concert you can come, just don't be late. I can name pages and pages and pages of things I've seen."

As a child, "when the opera season came round, I was just given money and I went when I wanted to go. My family were what I guess you would call free thinkers and we all more or less did what we liked. I used to run away from school, and if there was an opera coming I wouldn't be anywhere to be seen. I spent money like water going to concerts and operas. My family knew about it all and they let me do it." As an adult, he "wouldn't mind going to Chile if there was a great opera. I would just get in the plane and go to Chile because that was that. I'd spend three nights and come back. Other times, I would camp at the Metropolitan Opera House. I fed there and just waited for seats. I would always get in. I don't know how. Anywhere there is music, I feel, is my home."

And that "home" is rather a sore point. Home and music, especially in our century, never really coalesce. Music implies travel. Home, for Frank Brown, was almost as ephemeral and fleeting as a concert's bestowal of notes and emotion.

Frank's father died in the Great War and his mother decided she would live her life apart, some but not all the time. He, therefore, was brought up in the main by his grandparents: Grandpa Frank and Grandma Sarah. His grandfather's viewpoint regarding the whole matter was quite clear: "'For you,' he said to me, 'travel is the best thing. Some people it doesn't suit but you, yes'." And so, coming from what he calls "the era of the ship," he would go "from Sydney to London and London to Berlin and then to Dresden and from various cities to somewhere else" -- at first accompanied by his grandparents, later solo.

"Grandmother would say she wanted to go home so she'd go home and on the way stop off in Malaysia. My aunt would be in California, someone else over there. We were all over the globe, we weren't staying in one place. I never felt I belonged anywhere. We used to say that on the ships we could wave to each other, though more often it would be send a word on the wireless: 'I'm going this way and you're going that.' I used to cross my family in mid-ocean."

The first stop in Egypt came in what Frank estimates must have been November 1930. "November," he tells me, "is what they used to call the English Month. Everything was green," he says, "you can't imagine. It was like Paris. And the climate was so pure -- no dust, beautiful weather." They stayed for three months or so, stayed at the Shepheard's, before it burnt down, rented a dahabiya from Thomas Cook and made their way up and down the Nile. Egypt must have been at its best, paradisiacal and dreamy -- however much bedevilled by empire.

The fish had found waters to rest in. But Frank Brown never thinks of himself as a fish, always a bird. Somewhere Plotinus is meant to have said that "He who loves music too much will be reborn as a bird," and Frank Brown thinks of himself as a cormorant. As a "baby," as he calls it, he used to sit and watch the cormorants all day -- "what wonderful things they are"-- so much so that his family took to calling him 'wauk': the primary component of cormorant speech. And so maybe it was the bird that found a place to land. Either way, Cairo was to be a point of much return.

"New York, London, Vienna and Cairo are my cities, you can have the rest of them but I want those." There may be some problems arranging that one.

Frank was here for the 1952 Revolution, the Suez War, the Six-Day War, Nasser's resignation, Umm Kulthoum's death, Sadat's assassination and, since 1987 or so, for everything. For a "foreigner," he's done his fair share. Perhaps the true mark of a Cairene are these words of his: "We all love Cairo, but we have to grumble at it -- it's professional."

But back to music, or sort of.

Mathematics, they say, is the musician's lot. Heisenberg and Einstein are said to have been very musical. There are those who adore maths and those who hate it, but very few who remain indifferent, and if we are in the realm of summarised biography, mentioning that Frank was a bad, bad mathematician must be a prerequisite -- our own little substitute for Freud. "At school I would always come roundabout first at most subjects, but in mathematics, without fail, last.

"I didn't know nine from nine. I used a gardening almanac in an exam. The headmaster called my grandfather and said 'Excuse me, I think we have a problem.' I remember sitting in class with the other people scribbling away, their pages full of numbers, mine empty -- what can you do? Use the gardening catalogue. The patterns I made on the page were very beautiful. Oh yes, I was always last in class for maths."

Still, Frank says he's always "had a liking for the incomprehensible." He adores contemporary classical music. His piano teacher always used to give him Medtner, Busoni, Schoenberg and Berg to play. Never things like Tchaikovsky, "which I guess she thought I could do myself." He is very interested in Conlan Nancarrow, who famously wrote music so difficult to play that he decided to write for the only instrument that would play as instructed, the pianola; also Kaikoshru Sorabji, who again wrote music so difficult that he banned it from performance for most of his life because "no performance at all is vastly preferable to an obscene travesty;" Eliot Carter, Szymanowski and Scriabin. In literature he goes for Raymond Roussel, Gertrude Stein and later Joyce.

But most music or literary giants, he still adores. One might say that for him the incomprehensible provides more interest but is no less esteemed or loved.

So is it incomprehensible or clear? Dissonant or harmonic? Blake or Brown? Fish or bird? What remains to be asked is simple: Has anyone here seen Frank Brown?

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