The Chronicles of Brendan Earle, Apprentice Mage.

The Music

Adam

Vegetarian fare again tonight. A tagine, I thought, with what looked like large, ball-shaped mushrooms. They flaked apart in a way that I’ve never seen in a mushroom, though, and had a taste a bit like cinnamon tofu. The description doesn’t do the meal justice.

I got the impression meat went on the menu infrequently if at all. All this was set before the food laws came in, so I didn’t know if it was original, or a detail they’d put in to comply with current tastes. I’d seen cows grazing in fields while walking here, and they obviously hadn’t suffered the Death of the Herds. Having been out of the UK, I’d only read about the in vitrio meat coming from the Vertical Farms, but I’d heard it wasn’t popular with youngsters, some of whom couldn’t remember ever eating beef.

After the meal older members of the Hall started to pull out instruments and a musicians’ evening started. Occasionally, one person would perform a solo, sometimes small groups would knock out a song, and at other times folk would just jam together. Some of the older teens, who’d obviously seen this before, wandered off. Others hung around, drinking more chia and nattering. Our cohort mostly stayed. They were new and didn’t know what else to do, I suppose.

Jake was at the top table and, by popular demand, was called on to sing. He had a guitar and performed some comic songs, still in that gruff, intense style of his. The first one was about some group of witches from Castleford, the next about a Gorilla, the last about some love of his life called Isabel. Let’s say that none were quite PC, but were received with gales of laughter and lots of applause.

After a while, the numbers around started to thin a bit more and I couldn’t stand just sitting doing nothing. I borrowed a mandolin and jammed. Probably a bad move as far as keeping my head down went, but it made me feel better. I was a very short way in before I realized Brendan‘s fingers weren’t callused like mine, but it wasn’t too painful.

Eventually, I gave them a version of ‘Behind Blue Eyes’. Mark reckoned he’d heard it on a Chieftains track once and had adapted it. He also reckoned we could impress girls who heard it with how sensitive, soulful and tortured we were. The first time I played it for Harumi she’d asked if this was for impressing girls with; she laughed when I asked her if it was working. A fiddler and a penny whistle player joined in as accompaniment.

McGregor collared me after and asked if I’d be interested in a concert he was organizing soon.  It seemed he was a drummer and a Who fan. He described himself as ‘the Risen Moon’, a line I couldn’t believe anyone else here would get. I told him yes, because no would sound odd, and wandered back to sit down with others from the cohort. A few girls were hanging around. Miya and Jade didn’t exactly elbow them aside, but proprietary rights were demonstrated. Lewis and Lucas were watching all this very closely and collared me to ask what the thing was called I’d been playing and how long it’d take to learn it.

Why not, I thought, grabbed a couple of what looked like Columbus mandolins (Ray Jackson played the hook for Maggie May on one of those) and started a lesson there and then. On a hunch, I started them on Jez Lowe's version of  Dover, Delaware. As with the Jo exercises, they both picked things up too quickly and didn’t make nearly enough mistakes – not a complaint you usually get to make as a music teacher. We went on for a while and then the Hall closed up for lights out. It was only when I got to bed I realized I hadn’t felt miserable for hours. I still didn’t want to stay, but that bit was fun.

Phoebe

The evening concert was a bit more than I’d thought it’d be. It’s sort of mentioned that people play music in the evenings in Book One and you do see a few playing in the first DIV, but it was different from what happened. Like the DIV had just a few people sort of playing guitar to themselves, it wasn’t the big party that happened in the Hall.