The delightful and offhand concept of musical “loitering” was gleaned in conversation with the maestro. Instead of applying some painful anatomic or organic metaphor like “maturation,” Helps’ idea of learning — the process of ”getting to know“ a piece of music — seemed to prone a more territorial and delinquent concept.
Profoundly against the bourgeois system of musical ”authority“ as propagated in Conservatories, Helps encouraged his students to approach masterworks with a certain audacity, as if loitering without aim around a public building at an undue hour.