A lovely festival at West Malling, Kent, near Gads Hill where Charles Dickens lived, is taking the chance to have a good look at the great author's connections with music. Seemed like high time someone did this, this being the Dickens bicentenary year, et al, so I asked its artistic director, Thomas Kemp, for an e-interview to explain what he's up to and why. Get down to Music@Malling from 27 to 30 September.
JD: Tom, what made you want to celebrate Dickens's musical life?
TK: I was brought up in Kent and had my first violin lessons in the kitchen at West Malling primary school! It is a very historic market town with a lot of interesting buildings from diverse historic periods. In the 19th century, Town Malling was famous for cricket and Dickens visited the village on many occasions - he immortalised the cricket ground in The Pickwick Papers - a scene that used to be on the back of a ten pound note: a landscape that can still be viewed from my old primary school. The fact that there is this connection led me to programme music that was connected to him. [Illustration: a cricket match in The Pickwick Papers, by Robert William Buss]
Music@Malling also promotes the work of living composers and this year the featured composers are Judith Bingham and Huw Watkins.
JD: Which were Dickens's favourite composers? With which musicians was
he friendly? In what ways was he supportive of them?
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JD: What influence do you think music had on his writing?
TK: There are many references to music in the novels and these are used to provide a fascinating social commentary on the function of music in 19th- century England, where music was the dominant form of domestic entertainment. Many of the traditional airs and songs that he sang make their way into his writings and I think that there is a musicality to the way Dickens uses words.
JD: Tell us something about the Dickens-themed concerts you're doing at Music@Malling?
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Below: a sample from the inaugural festival shows Tom conducting Chamber Domaine in Mahler's Fourth as you probably haven't heard it before...

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