The Naffest Musical Instrument

My favourite shop in London is The Recorder Centre.

Yes. Indeed. I'm afraid so. I'm out of the closet.

I play the naffest musical instrument of them all.

Painfully inflicted on generations of school kids as an introduction to ensemble playing (and this is how I began), the recorder is almost universally reviled.

Tell someone you play it and they invariably say "Oh so do I. I learned it at school." And then they launch off into a discussion of how their son/daughter plays the violin/cello/flute/oboe and so on. A REAL musical instrument.

I was apologetic too. At first.

I could tootle away for hours, just pleasing myself, making up tunes, playing by ear. But that was as far as it went. When I went to Nigeria, I took a recorder with me and played songs and Christmas carols for my students to sing to. I chucked two recorders in my suitcase when I first came to Malaysia, and just played for myself whenever I wanted to relax and had nothing better to do.

Then I found the shop on one of my visits home, on Chiltern Street, a short walk from Baker's Street and Oxford Street. A whole shop selling recorders? I was amazed.

I asked the assistant if she could sell me some music for my recorder. I wasn't very advanced, did she have something fairly easy to play? I enjoyed the instrument, I told her, but wished that I could play a PROPER instrument.

She didn't skip a beat. She lead me across the shop to a display of CD's. Look, she said, all these are recordings of recorder music, and all by professional recorder players. It is a proper instrument. A beautiful instrument. And it's every bit as challenging to play well as any other instrument. You need to take it seriously. (Since she was a professional recorder player herself, as I later learned, I can appreciate her anguish.)

She showed me recorders costing thousands of pounds and let me try them. My favourite was a sub sub contra bass recorder, shaped like an organ pipe with a curved metal mouthpiece and as tall as me. Whoever would have thought that a recorder could look and sound like this? (One day I'll buy one.) And then she searched her shleves for music I would enjoy learning to play.

I brought the sheet music and a couple of books on technique back to Malaysia with me. Practiced almost daily and enjoyed myself thoroughly.

On my next trip home (alas when my mother was dying of cancer, and I needed, desperately, something to make me happy), I bought a tenor recorder, a ton of music and CD's of recorder players to inspire me.

And now, although I still have much to learn (particularly about how to get the ornamentations - trills, battements, flattements, grace notes - to sound right), I'm really flying. I love the feeling of being right inside the music, making the notes with my breath.

And above all I love the music I play. Telemann, Mozart, Vivaldi, Purcell, Loueillet, Handel and many composers I'd never heard of before, but am equally enchanted by. I'm learning the recorder part from Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 - a brilliant, glittering piece which stands alone perfectly without the rest of the orchestra (but which is just a single thread of colour in Bach's scheme of things, each thread as vivid as the next to form an incredible tapestry of sound).

I don't care I don't care I don't care if the instrument is naff! I don't care if the world doesn't care for this instrument. I don't care if no-one cares for my playing. I'm happy making music and am busy discovering new worlds.