Hartley Neita, ContributorDURING THE 1940s and 1950s, Hope Gardens was the stage for a one-Sunday-each-month afternoon performance by the Jamaica Military Band.
The programme included the works of composers such as Chopin, Bach, Schubert, Beethoven, Brahms and other European greats of previous centuries, and contemporary American composers such as Jerome Kern and George Gershwin. Now and then there was a touch of mento.
I believe the Band also performed on other Sundays at the now St. William Grant Park at the Parade in downtown Kingston and at other community parks elsewhere in the Corporate Area.
I discovered the Hope Gardens venue during my years at Jamaica College. As a boarder at the school, we 80 or so boys were allowed to go there on Sunday afternoons without being monitored by a prefect or a master and we took full advantage of this freedom. Many a schoolboy and schoolgirl romance grew from the buds of these afternoon rendezvous contacts.
Well do I remember the girl from Alpha whose eyes I gazed into as the Military Band played the song "Some Enchanted Evening" from the Broadway classic, "South Pacific".
MAGICAL MUSIC
On the Sundays the Band played in the gardens, many hundreds crowded the lawns around the bandstand, and sat on the parapets around the nearby water-flower pools. For two hours, we were lost in the beauty and the magic of the music. We walked back to the school humming Chopin's Etudes and Nocturnes and Bach's Studies.
Last week Saturday I had cause to remember those moments when mutual friends invited folklorist Olive Lewin to their home to reminisce about the years of her involvement with music.
"I believe," she said, "that we underrate Jamaicans where musical appreciation is concerned. We sometimes feel that they are not interested in the classics and are only moved by the Bujus, and Shaggies, and Tigers. Far from it!"
She recalled playing the piano at her home in Hayes, Clarendon, as a teenager and soon discovered that each evening a group of labourers who worked on the nearby sugar estates of Monymusk, Amity Hall and Bog, congregated at the gate listening silently and intently. She thought at first it was just curiosity until one of the men called out to her:
"Play this tune fo' we!" he said. And he hummed the opening bars of Chopin's "Ballad in A-Flat".
The same thought has been echoed by trade unionist-historian Frank Gordon. He told me that during the 1930s, hundreds of residents lined the roads outside the East Queen Street Baptist Church, Scots Kirk, Coke Methodist Church and others to listen to rehearsals by the choirs led by Lloyd Hall, George Goode and other conductors. The late Sister Ignatius, the mentor of the Alpha Boys Band, also told me once that hundreds used to line the sidewalk on South Camp Road on the nights the Alpha Choir practised. And the bus drivers never blew their horns as they drove by.
CLASSICAL PROGRAMMES
Now, except for Radio Mona, our radio stations have abandoned classical programmes. Carl Young, the founder and head of IRIE-FM once told me that his research suggested that Jamaica is just one giant juke box - hence the reggae diet on his station's menu. It seems too, that the producers of Jamaican television commercials subscribe to this view as their productions are loud and aggressive.
Music can help to return Jamaica to its gentler times. Maybe it's a wild idea, but could our radio stations give us 30 minutes of Chopin and Kern at midnights? Every night. What a powerful statement this could be. Could this soften the aggressiveness of kicking down doors and blasting the nights with the sound of bullets.
Let's have the sound of music.
