Borodin in Devon

How music became a catalytic part of my education

THE POLOVTSY CAMP. Stage-set design for Act Two of the opera "Prince Igor by Borodin (1930) by Ivan Bilibin (1876–1942)

The town where I attended secondary school in the 1970s was in rural Devon and far from being cosmopolitan. It had apparently seen migration from other parts of the country in its distant heyday as a manufacturing town, but I wasn’t aware of that then. London, just two hundred miles away, seemed to belong to a different country altogether. Even those of us brought up on farms in the area hardly saw the local town as an outpost of civilisation, more of a refraction of our own cultural backwardness. The most exotic thing about the place was probably the smell of hops simmering in the local brewery that would blow across the school grounds a couple of times a week.

But the state school I went to became a catalyst for change, even a beacon for hope for those looking to escape. I was only dimly aware of this at the time, but looking back, the teachers, many from other parts of England and holding what were then still rare university degrees, brought a different perspective to our lives. This showed in the curriculum and also in the pioneering series of international exchanges that the school would embark upon about the time I arrived.

A keen rugby player, I spent most of my time in practice or playing matches—we sometimes had two or three fixtures a week—and I didn’t have a lot of time for other pursuits. To be honest, I wasn’t hugely interested in exploring other cultures. There wasn’t a big athlete vs the rest divide in the school, but I didn’t feel I had much in common with the small band of talented artists and musicians in the school.

In my first year I’d resisted learning the basics of musical notation from a teacher who seemed as old as—and no more interesting than—the composers he mentioned—Mozart, Haydn, Tchaikovsky—and whose names I quickly forgot. But by the time I reached the third year at the school, there were some keen and progressive music teachers who sought to stir our interest in the subject.

Under duress, I’d learnt to emit a few feeble sounds from the recorder and even blew along in a school concert, but I didn’t feel drawn to music as a subject or a practice. I’d grown up in a household where nobody played an instrument. The music on the radio was just occasional background to a life in which everyone—my parents anyway—was just too busy to pay much attention to such things. I remember just one classical record perched on the shelf without its original cover at home—Brahms's Piano Concerto No. 2, which my parents played once or twice. I know my mother enjoyed piano music, but I now wonder how that LP found its way into my parents’ meagre collection.

Portrait of Borodin by Ilya Repin, 1888

English state schools (they’d be called public schools in the US) aren’t famous for their wonderful infrastructure. Although this one had a fine old redbrick main building, many classes, including music and art, were taught in prefabricated cabins dotted around the school’s battered all-weather sports pitch. No doubt they were intended originally as temporary ways of dealing with expanded school numbers. Of course, they became permanent.

I think it was one day in early spring during the lunch break that I happened to be walking through the school grounds past one of these huts. Without any preamble, the sound of female voices floated out from inside the hut and stopped me in my stride. I don't remember if I was with anyone at the time, and almost certainly I wouldn’t have commented on the music. But it was without a doubt the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard.

We often talk of being transported by music, and this really did feel like a bodily experience, a kind of musical teleportation. I had no idea at the time what this music was or where it was from. But its beauty seemed like a new country being staked out in my heart.

I later found out that it was a section from Borodin’s opera Prince Igor, The Polovtsian Dances, sung by girls of the school choir. They were probably rehearsing for a concert I had no thought of attending. The Polovtsian Dances exist in various forms and arrangements, but if you listen to the opening of this version, you will hear the piece exactly as I remember it.

This moment of pure joy didn’t create an instant transmutation. I didn’t become a performer or even a concertgoer overnight. But within a year, I’d find myself taking part in a major school musical production, urged on by the new music teachers.

But most importantly, I would gradually find music beginning to take a central place in my life—not only the pop or rock I listened to at home on the radio but also classical music, which I’d go on to explore widely at university. As I look back, I see that that moment outside the music hut was the starting point for that. It was as if a chain reaction had been set in motion.

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I also see now that the inclusion of this music into the school repertoire was part of an enlightened way of teaching “integrated studies,” where music and art combined with the history and geography of Russia and America, our main topics that year in school. Both these great countries captured my imagination for their huge expanses of territory and dynamic history so different (it seemed to me then) from the rather stolid evolution of the small land of gently rolling farmland that I lived in.

These varied and engaging classes stimulated my mind and began to make me yearn to see more of the world. And I believe that hearing the beauty in that music by Borodin also got me to appreciate the classes even more.

We would read, later that spring, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, published in 1962, as the first account of Soviet labour camps. ¹ The book left a huge impression on me in its account of the loss of liberty, but also about how people struggle to thrive even in the most inhospitable of environments.

We also learnt of how the people suffered under the Tsars and the ultimate demise of the Romanovs. What I didn’t know then was that Borodin (1833-1887) was an education reformer as well as a doctor and chemist. If I’d heard his name then, I’d have said it belonged in the periodic table, and indeed he made important contributions to organic chemistry.

But as I sat bored at the back of chemistry class later that day, stashing away unused chemicals with which to conduct my own aimless (and mercifully harmless) experiments, I had no idea that the man who composed such astonishing music was among the first chemists to demonstrate nucleophilic substitution, as well as the co-discoverer of the aldol reaction.

I can now almost imagine him clumping into our old chemical lab that reeked of ammonia to lecture us on the electrolysis of water while his music played in the background. These kinds of rich connections across the curriculum and across time are like the bonds of a new compound formed in a reaction; they could not have been planned or even foreseen by those in charge of our learning.

It makes me realise that only we can join up the dots of our own education, dots that then shape the journeys that we will go on. But it’s the wise alchemy of good teachers that provides us with the elements we need and which we will over time recombine into the substance of our lives.

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Borodin died before finishing Prince Igor, which is based on a 12th-century poem about the Russian’s battles with the Polovtsians, who were Turkic nomads of the Eurasian steppe. The famous song I listened to was a “song of the slave women,” and to be honest, the whole piece feels to me now like a classic example of orientalism (a term I didn’t know then, of course). But still, it retains a special place in my heart.

Borodin wrote many other fine works in his spare time from the lab and medical practice and when not pioneering medical education for women in Russia. Among his other works that I’ve since enjoyed are his beautiful string quartets and the symphonic poem In the Steppes of Central Asia.

My school’s commitment to internationalisation—which I think was a new initiative in the state-funded school sector then—would take me on a life-changing school exchange to France later that year, where I’d spend two months at a school in the French Alps (a story for another time).

But, looking back, I think that my first international journey wasn’t that trip to France but was the earlier voyage of the spirit that Borodin’s music took me on.

Decades would pass before I was able to see in person the giant expanses of the steppes of Eurasia depicted in Prince Igor for myself from the window of the Trans-Siberian Express. But thanks to those teachers and the happenstance of hearing Borodon’s music outside that modest music room hut, when I finally gazed upon that majestic landscape, it felt like the music had already taken me there, that I was experiencing it for the second time.

1. And also that year, we’d read John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” and “Of Mice and Men.”