‘Music is the deepest of the Arts and deep beneath the Arts,’ someone once said. Forster I think, though it may have been Hitler. I read Mein Kampf and Two Cheers For Democracy in the same week and I still keep muddling them up. Whatever. Music is certainly deep beneath what the universities call the televisual arts, or what a man on Question Time (now greatly diminished by the return of Robin Day) called ‘the most immediate media’. The Handbook of Rhetorical Terms calls that an oxycretin.

Now I hope I have as tolerable an ear in music as the next man. You can give me the tongs and the bones any time, and I’ll be as happy as Larry the sandboy and as right as a rainy trivet. Any time, but not all the time: I