An old friend of mine, a fellow musician, wrote to tell me about a lovely dream he had had. He, I and another musician friend were sitting in the branches of a cherry tree playing music together. ‘The cherries were the notes!’ he said.

He didn’t say what instrument I was playing, if any, though I suppose that if cherries were the notes, the leaves of the tree might have been playable, like piano keys.

I was thrilled by the idea of cherries being notes, or notes being cherries. One could easily imagine that cherries on their stalks could prompt the unconscious mind to think of notes on their stems. Pairs of cherries could be quavers.

I found myself wondering how long ago it was that music notation started using round note-heads on black stems to represent crotchets, minims, quavers and all the rest. At university I remember studying early notation which used squiggles (‘neumes’) to represent rising and falling pitch. Later there were squares and diamonds to represent individual notes.

Round note-heads on stems seemed to develop after the Middle Ages. I was surprised to read that note-heads are supposed to be oval, not round, and tilted slightly upwards towards the right. Nobody ever mentioned that to me in my years of notating music for various sorts of exams. Round note-heads were what we wrote, and no-one suggested otherwise. Think how long it would have taken us to make each note-head oval and slightly tilted to the right!

I feel there is educational potential in getting students to think of notes as fruit.