Remembering Charles

What makes a critic successful? Being right? Having insight into his or her subject? Writing well? Stirring up controversy? Well, all of these and none. I remember a conversation about this with Charles Acton, whose pre-critical career was about as varied as you could get. At college he studied chemistry, physics and mineralogy, but didn't take a degree. He found himself more drawn to amateur dramatics than to lectures. He worked for Thomas Cook's, in London and in Palestine, where he also took on a job in a library. Back in Ireland he got involved in farming, in market-gardening in Blackrock, in selling a tripod harvesting system, in managing the bar in a hotel, in running cars on charcoal (during the war), and in selling the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But it was his view that it wasn't any of the above, or his musical pursuits as pianist, bassoonist or concert promoter that marked him out to be a critic. "I think first of all that people should want to read me tomorrow," he told me once. This, he felt, was the only qualification of a critic. And read him, people did. And argue about him. And with him, both privately and publicly, through the letters page.

Charles, of course, did have other qualifications. In person and in print he was somehow larger than life. He made his readers pay attention to the music and issues he cared about, and he was a passionate, tireless campaigner. He campaigned successfully for concerts to start on time and at a standardised time. Contrast Dublin with Belfast, and you'll know what this means. At the end of his reviewing career - he wrote reviews for a number of years after he retired - he was still game for a campaign to reassert some sort of order on the drifting apart of lunchtime concert starting times. And the target of his concern, the 12.50 p.m. start of RTE lunchtime orchestral concerts, has since been changed to 1.05 p.m.

You name it, he fought about it: Arts Council funding, contemporary music, ornamentation, Irish composers, opera producers (who I remember taking full-frontal assaults at Wexford Festival press conferences), vibrato, repeats in sonata-form movements, and of course, time after time, RTE, which in conversation he always referred to as RE, harking back to the days before television arrived.

His presence at concerts had something proprietorial about it. As a teenager taking to the habit of regular concert-going, I never had to be told which of the regular faces belonged to the critic from The Irish Times. I just knew. His writing style inclined towards the polemic. His views on a wide range of topics were so strongly held and closely interwoven that it wasn't unusual for single concerts to provoke a torrent of deeply felt commentary that wasn't always directly related to the music on the programme or the performances on the night. Although performers may from time to time have been dismayed at the outcome, the uniquely personal tone and the unmistakable throb of heartfelt concern were what made his writing such compulsive reading. The contact with the writer seemed palpable.

Before I came to write about music myself, I only saw Charles from the outside, by reading his columns and reviews and engaging in the debates they sparked. As a fledgling reviewer, I came to know him as a caring, supportive colleague. Within six months of my own first review having appeared (in, hard as it is to imagine today, In Dublin magazine), he had invited me to write the occasional review for The Irish Times. Our first conversation at a press reception had the air of being loaded with trick questions. I was being tested. I worked out afterwards that it was really just to gauge my mettle. There weren't any right answers, only right ways of responding. I was expected to have a point of view and to know how to stand up for it. It had to be that way. You wouldn't survive as a critic otherwise. And I wouldn't have survived conversation with Charles otherwise. For, as I already knew from reading his reviews, and he would learn from reading mine, we were as likely to disagree about anything musical as agree.

It tends to be forgotten now, but Charles ranged far and wide in his coverage of music, from musicals to what is nowadays called world music, through the gamut of classical music to traditional Irish, sometimes traversing the city for up to four concerts in a single day. Composer and academic Micheal O Suilleabhain, who similarly straddles a number of musical worlds, feels Charles's passing marks the end of an era. He recalls "a huge overlap of energy between himself and O Riada". There was, he says, "something exciting inthe appropriation of the traditional musical voice by a classical commentator. It was political in the cultural sense of the word, and significant for its time". And from his student years in Cork, he recalls Charles as a "formidable presence at the contemporary choral music seminars, always ready to get actively involved in discussion".

Pianist and director of the Royal Irish Academy of Music, John O'Conor, feels "a great hole in my life. Charles was such a large part of my life for so long - having rows with him, getting on with him, loving him, hating him. I've always had great respect for what he did for music in Ireland. We shall miss him terribly in the Academy, where he was on the board of governors. He did so much for us here in so many ways.

"I shall miss his incredible, abundant enthusiasm for music, which informed everything he wrote. I'll miss his campaigning which has helped all of us achieve what we have achieved in our own lives."

Former Irish Times editor Douglas Gageby remembers him as "a delightful chap. He enjoyed slight eccentricities, but he was a splendid colleague and he knew his stuff". As did - and does - his wife Carol, not so much a constant companion as an almost inseparable one. Their mutual devotion was a joy to themselves and to others. Her acute musical judgment, I'm sure, was an influence, a source of independent information which I suspect was always more likely to strengthen his views by challenging them than to change them. Her loss in all respects is great indeed.

I can think of no other summary than the words I wrote on Charles's retirement in 1986. Having read it, he joked to me that he must be one of the few men to have read his obituary while still alive. The past tense of my words now sadly reads with a finality it didn't have then.

"If there is a single person who over the last quarter century or so bestrode the musical scene in Ireland like the proverbial Colossus, that individual was Charles Acton. Courted and accommodated by the musical profession while at the same time feared and maligned, he remained the critic that the musical public never chose to ignore, and became in Ireland a figurehead among music critics just as Sean O Riada did among composers. "If his reforming zeal has not burned so fiercely in recent years it is because of the success of many of his early campaigns. His unique blend of the genial and the prickly will be missed, I suspect, even by those who differed with him most."