A tribute to a life spent listening
He was a jovial man with shaggy, sandy hair. I remember big hands and a bulbous nose but it’s been a while so perhaps that’s my memory playing tricks. His name was Tony Brooker – always Mr Brooker to me – and I knew him really well and not at all.
Mr Brooker died recently. Roger Marbeck of Marbeck’s record store reckons Mr Brooker was 92; I think he was 89. We may both be wrong. I don’t even know what he did for a living and yet I knew him intimately. For more than 10 years he was a customer of mine at various record stores. He came in at least once a week and always bought something, and his music buying pre-dated our association by decades.
By the time he died, aged 92 or 89 or neither, Mr Brooker had compiled one of New Zealand’s finest classical music collections.
He was a proper collector. Mr Brooker owned complete sets of Bach cantatas (more than 200 of them) and Haydn symphonies (more than 100 of them). He had the full Schubert lieder, 600 perfectly crafted songs in a language that I’m pretty sure Mr Brooker didn’t speak.
He went off on tangents, too, following history and geography and whim. Music of the Iberian diaspora was a passion, and he loved his late-Romantic Russians and his Italian Baroque vocal music. He bought more Telemann than I knew existed, literally hundreds of CDs, some of them almost certainly rubbish but that’s collecting for you.
In all he had 35,000 CDs and LPs. Each one had a little sticker on it, where he recorded every occasion he pulled it from the rack to listen. I remember him telling me that he’d reached a point where he knew there were many albums he would never hear again. There was just so much, and always more on the horizon.
So when Roger Marbeck tells you that Mr Brooker’s entire collection has been dropped at a junk shop, $2 a disc – well, you would, wouldn’t you? And you’d tell everyone you know who might care, wouldn’t you? (Though only after you’d spent 10 hours over three days picking through.)
So now I own another 250 CDs that I can’t really afford and that I don’t really need and that I absolutely do not have room for. And on the back of each one there’s a little sticker, telling me the last time Tony played it.
First published in The New Zealand Listener, January 14-20, 2023
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