"The timpani fell over and bounced down the steps"

Ian McEwan stepped back in time to introduce a special 50^th anniversary concert at the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts this month. The Booker Prize-winning novelist had been invited to read aloud the original programme notes he wrote as a University of Sussex English undergraduate for the arts centre's opening performance in 1969. But as he took to the stage, with the University of Sussex Symphony Orchestra behind him preparing to reprise Brahms' Academic Festival Overture, Beethoven's Piano Concerto no 3, and Stravinsky's Symphony in C, he confessed: "I have no recollection of writing these notes. I don't even know how they came about." Nevertheless the occasion gave McEwan, whose celebrated books included Atonement and The Children Act , an opportunity to reflect on his many other musical experiences at Sussex. "I was in the choir and we did a Dvorak mass, we sang the Mozart Dixit Dominus..and the most ambitious thing we ever did was a piece called The Story of Flight by Henze. A completely atonal piece. There was not a single harmonic relationship between one note and another." He recalled that the piece became a "musical worm" for him, so much so that while working on a building site during the subsequent summer, the foreman asked him what he was constantly whistling.