Having arrived back home from work early this evening, I decided to listen to a CD of Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto to help me unwind before making the dinner. For those who don’t know it, it’s a jaunty, irreverent piece which comes in at just under twenty minutes. Copland is one of my favourite composers, and his main achievement was in finding a way for the great classical tradition to combine with traditional American forms, so that the folk song, spiritual and Western hoedown added their own distinct flavourings to the symphonic tradition. The Clarinet Concerto, however, is slightly different- more abstract than Copland’s famous works such as Appalachian Spring and Rodeo, it’s a challenge for the soloist as the clarinet, usually such an urbane instrument, is given a more spiky and spontaneous part more reminiscent of jazz than of Mozart’s concerto for the same instrument.

One of the great blessings of music lies in its ability to evoke specific associations, and Copland’s Clarinet Concerto takes me back some twelve or thirteen ears to my student days at Bristol. If I admired one female contemporary for the whole of my three years there, it was a horse-riding, karate-practising clarinet player from Swansea. As with most university friendships, we lost contact with each other within a year or two of graduation; I knew from Christmas cards that she was studying for a doctorate in Nottingham and specialising in the poetry of D.H. Lawrence. I never heard her play the clarinet live, but one evening in my final year at Bristol she invited me to her flat for dinner. I don’t recall what we ate or drank, but I remember above all listening to her tapes of her own performance of the Copland concerto, the laconic dominance of the clarinet in the first movement and the sparky liveliness in the second. It has been my memory of her for the last twelve years; that, and an odd assortment of Christmas cards and party invitations from the years of our closest friendship.

And that was that for many years- she went her way into an academic career, and I went mine, following a path in which any notion of career was, well, academic. Ten years ago, the cost of studying for a PhD was roughly equivalent to the value of my parents’ house, so I went from one meaningless job in the financial services sector to another- until the Internet came along. Professional academics, under constant pressure to promote their departments and publish studies in order to sustain the prestige of their department, are particularly susceptible to Googling and can usually be found under their university or one of their publications, and my old acquaintance was no exception. Thanks to the unblinking scrutiny of the search engine, I traced her to a Northern university about an hour and a half’s journey from my home, but I have not as yet summoned up the courage to make contact. Although we have lived comfortably with the Internet for the last decade, it takes far longer than that to establish an etiquette for situations of this kind, and I need the right words and the right tone before I make my attempt. It is, after all, possible that I might be the victim of a coincidence of names and specialisms, so I dare not be too chatty; however, on the other hand, who greets an old friend after twelve years apart with a cold, indifferent handshake?