My father’s career resists the usual summary.
Christopher Slater studied conducting under Julius Harrison and, briefly, with Herbert von Karajan in Lucerne. He made his conducting debut in a concert led by Sir Adrian Boult. He worked as a répétiteur at Münster Opera House, conducted orchestras in Cape Town, toured internationally with ice shows, and twice conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Those are the lines that look good in a biography.
They were not most of his working life.
Most of it happened in Surrey: teaching piano at home, giving music-appreciation lectures in borrowed rooms, training church choirs, and assembling orchestras for the next concert. He regularly conducted local light-operatic productions of Gilbert and Sullivan, Lehár and Offenbach with twenty-piece pit orchestras. On tour, the work could look quite different: Snow White on Ice, with Kenny Baker appearing as one of the dwarves. He taught part-time at the Royal College of Music. He founded the Reigate Chamber Orchestra, the New Chamber Orchestra and the Reigate Philharmonic Society. In 1992 he formed the Slater Symphony Orchestra. He kept conducting until 2012, when he was eighty.
In 2021 he was made an Associate of the Royal School of Church Music. Its citation did not dwell on prestige. It recognised his work as a choral trainer and conductor: supporting local choirs across south-east England, encouraging young choristers into RSCM training, and helping communities deepen their musical contribution to worship.
In 1970, aged thirty-seven, he told a Surrey newspaper that the borough should have a music centre: somewhere people could learn instruments, attend lectures, sing in choirs and play in orchestras.
The building never arrived.
So he made the work without it. A lecture room here. A piano lesson at home. A church choir. An amateur orchestra rehearsing in whatever space could be found. The plan failed as architecture and survived as activity.
I have been thinking about that distinction.
We make musical careers easy to rank. Who held the prestigious post? Who conducted the famous orchestra? Who became the next Hans Zimmer? The questions sound objective because the answers fit into one line. They also discard most of what musicians do.
My father did conduct the London Philharmonic at Dorking Halls in 1960. He conducted them again at St John’s, Smith Square, in 1991, at a charity concert attended by the Princess Royal. But no permanent appointment followed. He returned to Surrey and carried on.
Was that the lesser career?
The Reigate Philharmonic Society eventually ended too. An institution built around live provincial classical concerts is vulnerable. Its members age. An audience changes its habits. Younger musicians inherit different pressures and different music. None of this requires a villain. Things can matter and still come to an end.
That ending makes “legacy” a difficult word. It tempts us to look for an organisation that still exists, a plaque on a building, or a line of successors doing exactly the same thing. But music rarely leaves evidence in that form. A concert disappears while it is being played.
What remains is distributed among people.
Someone learned to listen through one of my father’s lectures. Someone sang in a choir because he trained it. Someone played Brahms in an orchestra they could not otherwise have joined. Countless rehearsals gave professional and amateur musicians a reason to meet in the same room and attempt something difficult together.
I was one of the people shaped by it. I learned cello and piano. I heard long pieces before I had the patience for them. I later became a composer and stood in Abbey Road conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. That does not prove a straight line from his career to mine. Lives are not that tidy. But his work made music seem like something a person could build a life around.
Perhaps success in music is not a position you finally occupy. Perhaps it is the number of times you make the work possible: the room found, the choir trained, the concert mounted, the young ear given time to open.
My father wanted to build a music centre.
In the end, he built one out of people.