Discordant dinners

Musical experts can make the worst guests, writes Sue Bramwell. Over the dinner table you encounter all manner of people, at your place and theirs. That diversity is what we call part of life's rich tapestry.

Should your rich tapestry be a little more garish in colour and frayed at the edges than is good for your nerves then you may have had too much of the wrong guest and not enough of the right one lately.

The No. 1 guest voted in an entertaining at home-type magazine in the UK last year as the most irritating was the expert.

Any expert will apparently do, but wine, food and music experts top the list of people you don't want to be dining with.

They were followed closely by the all- round expert, as in if anyone has ever heard, seen or experienced something, then this particular guest has heard, seen or experienced it before or is a relative or intimate friend of someone who has.

Makes you sort of wish you'd stayed at home, doesn't it?

Anyway, you're out now, so you may as well make the most of it.

My sister, brother and I grew up in a home where dinner parties were frequent and accompanied by music.

The default position on the stereo for most dinner parties was jazz, but we were also subjected, at any time and without notice, to what can only be termed a totally eclectic choice that ranged from Gilbert and Sullivan to Beethoven and Wagner, with a spot of Percy Grainger in between.

We grew up believing that every child went to bed with the London Symphony Orchestra belting out Pomp and Circumstance in D Major and therefore Elgar's Land of Hope and Glory was, to us, simply a rousing bedtime lullaby.

Our exposure to a wide range of music made us fairly tolerant of other people's choices, although I admit to getting twitchy when I am subjected to Leonard Cohen for any length of time and firmly believe that when Suzanne took him down to the water, she should have held him under it until she saw the bubbles come up.

Fortunately, his long, mournful, self- indulgent dirges mean he rarely surfaces at dinners or parties anyway.

Musical experts are also rare to surface, but, like Leonard Cohen, inescapable when they come up for air.

"Listen to this," they exclaim with religious fervour as they wind up the volume on an obscure Eastern piece that intersperses painfully high notes with ones that only a bat can hear.

They then skip from track to track in a frenzied and disjointed attempt to complete the musical education of their guests within a three-hour period, leaving those guests praying frantically for a power cut. Even worse, they sing along and exhort you to do the same.

Singing along, unless I happen to be installed in a pew, is something I do only under the influence of an inordinate amount of alcohol and within a very large group, and in a very small voice.

But if being trapped in a musical appreciation nightmare at someone else's home is bad news, being trapped in your own with someone who has taken over the sound system is even worse.

Within a blink of the eye, they have proclaimed loudly and derisively that three-quarters of your music collection is mainstream rubbish and shamefully unearthed your secret stash of Streisand.

As you cannot, without good reason, leave your own home while your guests are still in it, you just have to sit it out.

Having said that, a friend of mine, fed up with just such a guest, calmly got up from the dinner table, thanked everyone for a lovely evening, and left, booking himself into the motel around the corner for the night.

Guests, and hosts, therefore, should remember that music is designed to soothe the savage breast, not jump-start the pacemaker beneath it.

Those who cannot help themselves and insist on showing off in an unseemly manner may well find themselves quietly corrected, like the man who proclaimed that only the Irish could have produced that great sentimental piece, Danny Boy.

While it originated in Ireland as a piece of folk music in the 1800s, the version that became world famous was written by an Australian, Percy Grainger, and was more commonly known as Londonderry Air, while the lyrics arrived more than 50 years later, courtesy of an English lawyer.

- © Fairfax NZ News