… when afar and asunder, parted are those who are singing today…
These are the opening words of the most famous public school song in England. It’s the song of Harrow School, founded in 1572 under a Royal Charter granted by Elizabeth I.
The school was established through the efforts and endowment of a local yeoman farmer named John Lyon, who had become wealthy enough to support educational and charitable works. Lyon’s intention was not originally to create an elite boarding school. He wanted to provide education for local boys of Harrow parish, particularly poor boys who otherwise would have had little access to learning. The original curriculum was heavily classical, focusing on Latin, Greek, rhetoric and religious instruction.
The school’s early buildings were clustered around the parish church of St Mary’s on the summit of Harrow Hill. The hill itself became central to the school’s identity: isolated, windy, commanding views over London and Middlesex. Even today, the setting is one of the school’s defining features.
“Forty Years On” was first performed in 1872 during celebrations marking the school’s 300th anniversary. The lyrics are by Edward Ernest Bowen, a Harrow master; and the music was composed by John Farmer, the school’s music master. The title refers to old boys returning to Harrow forty years after leaving and looking back nostalgically on youth, friendship and vanished time. The song became enormously influential and helped establish the entire tradition of sentimental English school songs.
The song is intensely nostalgic and reflective. It imagines ageing former pupils revisiting the hill and remembering lost youth, friendships, schoolboy ambitions, games and battles, dead companions and vanished innocence. The emotional power comes partly from the contrast between youthful confidence and old age.
The opening lyrics are:
“Forty years on, when afar and asunder
Parted are those who are singing today,”
And the song proceeds to ask whether those boys, decades later, will remember Harrow and the friendships formed there.
In May 1986 I began teaching music in my home, offering after-school piano lessons to children of all ages. I was young and inexperienced, but I knew I wanted to pass my musical training and skills onto others. Obviously, I started with just one pupil! Word spread, though, and soon I was teaching every evening, as well as having a full-time “day job”. I learnt my craft as I went along, and my pupils learnt with me. I entered them for exams (ABRSM in those days) and was delighted with their success.
I look back on the last forty years with the same feelings of nostalgia which are invoked in the Harrow School Song. I’m no longer in contact with that first pupil. I have maintained links with a few others who came in those early days, but there is definitely a feeling of “afar and asunder” when I look back on them all and wonder how they are all doing “forty years on”. If we met by chance, we probably wouldn’t know each other. The innocent eight-year-old who took Grade 1 piano under my guidance, is now nearly fifty!
It’s hard to believe so much time has rolled by. During those forty years I have watched my own two children grow up and I am now a grandfather. I have had hundreds of children and adults pass through my hands, musically speaking, and many have achieved Grade 8 or diploma standard. I have seen a dozen or so of those hundreds go on to music college or conservatoires, making music their career.
Not everyone stays, of course. I don’t think of it as a failure when someone stops learning, but it is a disappointment. I know how much music can do for you. Those few who choose a musical career are the exceptions. What I love most is when someone realises how much playing music means to them and how it can be a wonderful hobby and relaxation. Opening up new horizons by the gift of music is, and has always been, my aim.
I love teaching adults! They come with an enormous range of desires and hopes. Some have learnt piano as children, but have had decades of not playing. Others are total beginners. They may have always yearned to play. Or perhaps their children are learning and they want to be a part of it. So many reasons, all of them wonderful. I regard it as a real honour to teach my adult students. It’s hard, when you have a job you’re good at, or a lifetime of experience, to put yourself back “at school” again. It’s hard to realise you are struggling with something. Many adult students have a (false) idea that they will look foolish if someone sees or hears them play. I try hard to dispel the fear of failure, but it’s not easy!
If you are reading this because your child is learning music and you are not yet having lessons yourself, please consider it. Any instrument, any (good) teacher! It will bring so much to your life and will give you so much pleasure.
And so I remember the last forty years with pride. I, along with all music teachers, have changed people’s lives for the better. I hope to continue to do so for as long as possible, and – if you’re already my pupil, or you send your children to me – thank you for giving me the chance to add the gift of music to your, and their, lives.
Forty years on, when afar and asunder
Parted are those who are singing today,
When you look back, and forgetfully wonder
What you were like in your work and your play,
Then, it may be, there will often come o’er you,
Glimpses of notes like the catch of a song –
Visions of boyhood shall float them before you,
Echoes of dreamland shall bear them along.