Jeremy Montagu
Ethnomusicologist, percussionist, avid collector and curator who enjoyed a richly varied career
JEREMY MONTAGU, who has died aged 92, was the first musician to play under a conductor at the Royal Festival Hall when, during the original orchestral test concert at the end of 1950, he sounded the side-drum roll at the start of the National Anthem, an exercise known then as “rolling up the King”.
Despite being an experienced timpanist, Montagu had only six weeks to master the side-drum. While God Save the King passed smoothly, he was unable to hear Leonard Friedman, the violin soloist, in Rimsky-korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol. “[I] kept trying to roll softer, which I hadn’t the skill to do, so the roll kept stopping,” he recalled.
Montagu went on to pursue an eclectic range of musical interests as scholar, collector, lecturer, writer, conductor, performer, and general enthusiast – often propelled by a quantity of snuff. Yet he retained a soft spot for the drums, working as a percussionist with a gypsy band one week, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra the next, and on film sessions with Maurice Jarre the week after.
He conducted amateur orchestras, directed choral groups and was president and journal editor of the Galpin Society for the study of musical instruments. Other jobs included fixing players for the conductor Denys Darlow, Montagu recalling how “that could be a nightmare, finding enough flutes and oboes for two or even three simultaneous Matthew Passions on one weekend”.
Working as a music teacher, however, he found “a depressing business on the whole”. At one school he slipped a local bus driver £10 to source a collection of oil drums to use as steel drums. There he set up a performance of Carmina Burana with other schools, but the Catholic children, familiar with Latin, pulled out, he recalled, “because their kids could understand the words”.
Montagu played with several ensembles including Musica Reservata, the pioneering early music ensemble for which he reconstructed medieval percussion instruments. After one concert he was presented to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, who gently tapped the home-made drums, known as knackers, slung around his waist and asked: “What are those little things?” He replied: “Knackers, Ma’am” – and thereafter enjoyed relating that he was “one of the few men in London to have had his knackers tickled by the Queen Mum”.
Jeremy Peter Samuel Montagu was born in Kensington, west London, on December 27 1927, into the upper echelons of Anglo-jewish aristocracy; the family have owned a box at the Royal Albert Hall since it opened. He recalled a childhood of piano lessons, gramophone records and chanting in the synagogue.
His mother was Iris Solomon, daughter of the painter Solomon Joseph Solomon, and his father was Ewen Montagu, the wartime intelligence officer responsible for Operation Mincemeat, the scheme to mislead the Germans into thinking the next Allied landing would occur in Greece, which was depicted in the film The Man Who Never Was (1956). As a small boy Jeremy once disrupted the soldiers playing on the bandstand in Kensington Gardens by standing up and conducting them.
He was educated at Boxgrove, a boarding school outside Guildford where attendance at chapel was compulsory despite his Jewish faith. In 1940 he and his younger sister, Jennifer, were evacuated to Connecticut, where he heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Serge Koussevitzky.
Back in England in 1943 he was sent to Gordonstoun, acquiring a French horn abandoned by a master serving in Burma. He was called up by the Army and served with the Education Corps in Egypt. After knocking on the door of a building labelled Institut Fouad Premier de Musique Arabe he was introduced to such Middle Eastern instruments as the qanun (a type of harp), the oud (in the lute family) and the ney (a cane flute).
Following in his father’s footsteps, Montagu read Economics and Law at Trinity College, Cambridge, but spent much of his time making music. He moved to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, taking lessons in conducting, horn and viola. There the orchestra had a surplus of horn players and a dearth of percussionists, leading to his switch to timpani.
As a student Montagu set up the Montagu String Ensemble, known as Monty’s Meshuggahs. In 1952 he transformed them into a professional outfit, performing baroque music as authentically as possible. “There were no early fiddles around then, but we used harpsichord and lute continuo, added ornaments and altered rhythms,” he recalled. It was jettisoned “once the children had to be fed”.
Through the 1950s he played percussion with most of the major London orchestras, acquiring immense knowledge which he detailed in Timpani and Percussion (2002), one of several erudite reference books. Another was Musical Instruments of the Bible (1996). His own collection of instruments from all periods amounted to some 3,000 items.
Montagu’s curatorial career began in 1960, when he spent 12 months at the Horniman Museum in south London. That led to 30 years as officer in charge at weekends, his children permitted to take the resident alligator for walks.
The later part of his career was at the University of Oxford’s Bate Collection of Musical Instruments, where from 1981 to 1995 he was curator while continuing to pursue myriad musical interests, including running an informal conducting class. He was also elected a fellow of Wadham College.
In 1955 Montagu married Gwen Ingledew. Visitors to their home could sip whisky from silver cups that had accompanied one of his eminent ancestors at the Battle of Waterloo. In the downstairs lavatory hung a testimonial from the Royal Humane Society paying tribute to the occasion in 1951 when Montagu saved two men from drowning in the sea near Beaulieu in Hampshire.
His wife Gwen died in 2003 and he is survived by two daughters and a son.