THESE days, no self-respecting week in the annual calendar is without a designated cause. Campaigners, marketeers, and radio producers all need them. Finding a rhythm through the year by marking what is important to us is an example of how “the secular world mirrors the wisdom of the ages,” the Principal of Ridley Hall, Cambridge, the Revd Dr Isabelle Hamley, says. She hosted five episodes for the Daily Service (Radio 4 Extra, last week) to mark Mental Health Awareness Week, each considering one of the psalms and how they address human experiences of trauma and pain.
The quality of Dr Hamley’s voice, together with her French accent, means that she is lovely to listen to. Beyond that, she offered a reading of Psalm 23 which we can all too easily miss because of its familiarity; there may be green pastures along the way, but the task of the Good Shepherd is not to take and remain with us there. “The comfort of the shepherd is through the shepherd’s presence rather than through the absence of pain or struggle or danger.” The message of the psalm is that there is fullness of life with the Good Shepherd, even in the darkest of times.
This Cultural Life (Radio 4, Thursday) was not listed among the BBC’s offerings for Mental Health Awareness Week, but I doubt any were as powerful as the story told by the concert pianist James Rhodes of how he survived in his darkness. The physical and sexual abuse that he endured from the age of five at the hands of his prep-school gym teacher was such that he required three back operations.
When he was seven, he listened to a random cassette that he came across at home. It contained a recording of Bach’s Chaconne from his Partita No. 2, transcribed for piano. (“Thank God,” Rhodes said. “Can you imagine if it was a Bible or something?”) That piece and his subsequent dive into the world of music changed everything for him. It “tunnelled into the part of me that I felt had been extinguished”. Without it, he says, he would have died years ago.
Rhodes did not have piano lessons until he was 14. When his father blocked an opportunity for him to take up a music scholarship, he stopped playing for ten years, after which a series of serendipitous encounters led to the eventual launch of his performance career. Throughout and beyond those years, the legacy of abuse continued to express itself in self-harm, attempts to take his own life, and periods in psychiatric hospitals, one of which forbade the playing of music. A breakthrough moment came when a psychiatrist, acknowledging that Rhodes might not survive, promised to accompany him in trying to increase the odds that he would.
Rhodes has just released a new album, Mania, which he describes as a set of musical prescriptions to help to deal with insomnia, anxiety, and fear. Not surprisingly, his more general prescription for society is to invest heavily in childhood, particularly in children’s musical education. “If every child had the ability to learn a piano . . . it’s not that they’re going to play at the Wigmore Hall, but it will impact everything,” he says.
It is music — and, I would add, programmes such as those reviewed here — that help us to live in the world as it is, and to begin to shape new ones.
Gerry Lynch is away.