Jonny McCambridge: Great achievements in music – Beethoven’s ninth and my vegetable drum kit

My boy can be hard to shift. After some tense exchanges he eventually puts on his shoes and coat. We are about to head out the door when he speaks.

“Daddy, are we going to do my homework when I get home?”

My body stiffens. This is the first time that homework has been mentioned. I know the hour will be late before he returns to the house.

“What is it?”

”Music.”

I groan inwardly. Not my strongest area.

“What do you have to do?”

“You have to make a musical instrument out of a vegetable and then record a video of me playing it.”

There is a significant silence. I stare at him, trying to unravel the consequence of what he has just said.

“This has to be done for tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

‘When were you given this homework?’

A dreamy look comes into his features.

“Oh, I don’t know, a few weeks ago.”

There are moments, I have learnt, when it is best to step away and not say anything.

This is such a moment. I go to the little basket in the kitchen where I keep vegetables. It is bare save for two mouldy carrots, which may be left over from Christmas.

I go back to my son.

"Let’s go, you’ll be late for guitar.”

The arrangement is that I drop my son at the class and my wife picks him up later on her way home from work.

For most of the day I had earmarked this interim period, when I would be in the house on my own, for a sofa nap.

I had been looking forward to it. Instead, I find myself walking around the fruit and veg aisle of a busy supermarket. I am mumbling bitter words that are best not reproduced here.

Ridiculously, as I inspect the produce, I am Googling ‘How to make a musical instrument out of a vegetable’.

The online suggestions include a carrot flute (which seems too much like hard work) and a celery guitar (which makes absolutely no sense to me even when I watch an instructional YouTube video).

I put the phone away.

Given the short timespan I have been given and the limited choices, I have decided that some sort of drum is the prime option.

I choose a few items which I think can be hollowed out. However, my impromptu drum kit needs a centrepiece. Slightly loosening the rules of the project, I eventually settle on a watermelon.

A short time later and I am home, attempting to put together my edible drum kit before my son returns.

The peppers and melon are easily prepared, but the celeriac I had selected as the snare, is more difficult to hollow.

As I struggle with the hard flesh of the cold vegetable, I try to divert myself by turning on the wireless. Immediately, the unmistakeable sound of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony fills the kitchen. This is welcome as it takes my thoughts into a different place.

Beethoven’s final symphony ranks among his crowning achievements. We live in an age where the word ‘genius’ is bandied about easily. I prefer to recognise a more restrictive definition.

True genius, I believe, refers to one who can create or achieve things which are so far beyond the ability of the rest of us, that it almost escapes our imagination.

It is this way with the majesty of the Ninth Symphony. Astonishingly, Beethoven was almost completely deaf when he composed it. At its premiere in Vienna in 1824 he had to be turned around to face the audience to see their rapturous reception as he could not hear it.

The work itself pushed the development of symphonic music so far beyond what had previously been understood, that it cast, and continues to cast a giant shadow over all composers who have followed.

Brahms, arguably the next great composer of the 19th century, was supposedly so intimidated that he was unable to complete his first symphony for more than 20 years.

When he did eventually premiere it at the age of 43, he had to grumpily bat off questions about why the work was so plainly influenced by his illustrious predecessor.

Beethoven’s Ninth stands proudly alone at the farthest edge of human achievement within the canon of music. I look at my drum kit. It is on the other end of the scale. It looks miserable and close to embarrassing, nothing at all like how I had imagined it. I feel guilty that I was not able to produce something better to show my son.

The final movement of the Ninth Symphony begins, the famous Ode to Joy. It is heavy with percussion. I have made little drumsticks out of celery and, despite my low mood, I begin to play along, imagining the peppers and celeriac are the timpani.

Again and again I pound the vegetables. They sound not at all like drums and I am clearly out of time with the music on the little radio, but I go at it nonetheless with great enthusiasm. As the movement builds towards its stunning choral climax, I consider that this is anything but how I expected this evening would develop. I find that I am actually having fun.

I hear the sound of the front door. My son runs into the kitchen where I am still playing with gusto.

"Wow!” he exclaims. “That’s brilliant, daddy!”

I smile indulgently, before he adds…”Hang on! A watermelon is not a vegetable!”