Track one on side one is Blinded by the Light in which he sketches out

Track one on side one is “Blinded by the Light”, in which he sketches out a musical theme revisited in the more robust “Born to Run” a couple of years later. From the opening couplet, the syllables conspire to confound: “Madman drummers, bummers and Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat/ In the dumps with the mumps as the adolescent pumps his way into his hat.” The lines spill over with ambiguous references to calliopes and curly-wurlies, skullcaps and Scotland Yard “I was kind of writing anything that came into my mind That was my style,” Springsteen later commented “I’d write on the bus, I’d write on the subway It was real kind of stream of consciousness. I was just trying to find a bunch of words that rhymed.”An early champion of the New Jersey rhymer was Allan Clarke of The Hollies. “I discovered Bruce Springsteen a long time before anyone else,” he claimed.

“I had a set of song demos, and on it were ‘Born to Run’ and also ‘Blinded by the Light’.” Clarke recorded a few Springsteen numbers, but it was left to Manfred Mann and his Earth Band to give the Boss his first No1 and establish this neglected nonsense-verse as a progressive-rock classic.Cut loose like a deuce, Mann follows Springsteen down the crazy paving. A mini-Moog takes charge of Clarence Clemons’s saxophone riffs; verses and chorus are transposed, and, at one point, he even quotes from the two-finger piano jingle “Chopsticks”.”I’ve taken out words; I haven’t been very honest to the original at all. I think that’s quite important,” Mann said.”Blinded by the Light” was included on the Earth Band’s seventh album, The Roaring Silence, and was a hit in 1976, on the heels of their cover of another Asbury Park song, “Spirits in the Night”. At the time, Mann was not sure what Springsteen made of it all: “I gather he finds it quite interesting what we’ve done.. I don’t know whether he likes it.”. Some artists seem to be quite unfairly endowed with creative energy. In addition to writing a vast and varied catalogue of compositions, Dr Colin Matthews has served as amanuensis to Benjamin Britten and Imogen Holst, published many scholarly editions and articles, sat on umpteen foundations and committees for the betterment of his fellow musicians and set up a new music record label for which he works as executive producer.

And recently, as a little sideline, he has taken to arranging for symphony orchestra the complete Pr?des for piano – all 24 of them – by Claude Debussy. And next Sunday evening, in Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall, Edward Gardner and the Hall?rchestra will be giving the first performance of the latest three: an “English” group comprising “Hommage a S Pickwick, Esq”, “La danse de Puck” and “Minstrels” (the latter apparently inspired by a group of strolling players Debussy saw while he was staying in Eastbourne). In fact, this entire programme will consist of orchestral transcriptions from piano originals, culminating in Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition – not in Ravel’s ubiquitous version, but a reputedly plainer and certainly much rarer Russian scoring from the Fifties by Sergei Gorchakov.But then, out of the bald, yet suggestive eccentricity of its piano writing, Mussorgsky’s suite has become about the most arranged work in the Western canon, with at least a dozen more or less complete orchestral versions during the last century by musicians ranging from Sir Henry Wood to Vladimir Ashkenazy. Debussy’s Pr?des, by contrast, must rank among the most intrinsically pianistic pieces ever composed, their musical substance often seeming to arise out of the instrument’s very vibrations. Some of them have been orchestrated before: “La fille aux chevaux de lin” quite often, in fact, with its invitation to a solo instrument over purling strings and harp, or “La cath?ale engloutie”, scored with numinous elaboration by Stokowski. But what could possibly be the point of arranging most of the rest – apart from the sheer challenge?There are, after all, notorious disparities between the two mediums. Harp and percussion apart, the orchestra consists entirely of instruments capable of sustaining line and tone.

The piano, by contrast, can only create the allusion of a sustained line through techniques of touch and pedalling since, in reality, every note begins to fade the moment it is struck. And beyond all this there is an old question of whether it is ever ethical to score up a piece its composer never envisaged for orchestra. Rimsky-Korsakov, a great orchestrator himself, dismissed this as the equivalent of tinting old photographs. Or, if a piano piece is orchestrated, should its arranger ever go stylistically beyond what its composer might have done?Not that such quibbles would have troubled composers much before the mid-18th century.