One more song to see out the year (and suggest I haven’t quite completely given up on the thought of writing music for collective worship). Apparently it’s taken me since some time in 2012 to get from writing this to recording it, which is definitely what I call being a part-time musician. I certainly wouldn’t assume the track has any direct relevance to where I metaphorically am at the moment.
https://soundcloud.com/martinashmusic/holy-holy-holy
(apologies for the gratuitous The Prisoner reference there – if you didn’t get it, watch the original series, it’s gret. Not the remake)
Do you have friends who play gigs / concerts? Or even read poetry in public, act, dance etc.? Have you noticed how about half of all their contact with you is multi-channel invitations to gigs? Do you perform yourself? Do you find that you seem to spend more time on the marketing campaigns than the rehearsals, let alone the gigs?
Yeah, me too. Too some extent any vibrant cultural scene becomes self-defeating: there is so much on in my adoptive home city of Oxford relative to the number of people who live there, regardless of the proportion who want a full cultural life, that there simply isn’t really enough audience to go round on any given night. The majority of open mike nights are played to the people performing that night, the bar staff and maybe the performers’ girlfriends. (Sometimes not even them.) If you want a decent audience to your gig, you really do have to promote it properly – Facebook event (which most people won’t read the invitations to), emails, text messages, posters, work noticeboards, etc. And it is time-consuming and it is exhausting and musicians don’t on average have any more interest in marketing than anyone else so most of us don’t enjoy it. But it’s the only way I’ve found to get a vaguely decent number of people to anything. Even then it can feel like more of a reflection of how many friends you have and how loyal they are, rather than how good your set is.
But if you don’t, you basically won’t progress beyond playing for free, which if you work hard at your music (let alone your promotion) is frankly frustrating (and makes buying gigging kit a much more questionable invention). You won’t make anything on the door if you’re getting a cut, and if you’re being paid a fee without a door charge and the venue don’t make a lot more money at the bar than they would have done without you playing, the venue won’t ask you back. So if won’t be a marketeer, you almost certainly literally will be a free musician. Also, even free gigs can be empty, and whether money’s involved or not, I have to tell you playing to a nearly empty room is one of the most dispiriting experiences available in any performing art.
All of which doesn’t, I think, in any way diminish the feeling that someone else who isn’t playing should really be doing the promotion and that it’s frankly a stretch for the hobby you enjoy and so do alongside the job that pays the bills to involve you taking up another hobby you don’t enjoy. It can feel essentially like exploitation – that someone, presumably the venue / gig organiser, is using you as free marketing labour. It doesn’t make my feelings about music more straightforward when playing helps my mind but stress and disappointment don’t. But it’s either that or go back to the bedroom jams, unless you’re very lucky.
So the imaginary critics are asking. ‘Last time you were at all active on here you were saying mental illness, and depression in particular, is an obstacle to artistic creation not a spur to it; and now you’ve come back with a bunch of demo recordings, two original songs and one substantially rewritten, which are clearly born out of depression, and / or what might be called its spiritual side-effects.’
Well, I’m not sure that it is entirely contradictory. Let me tell a story about this.
The other week, the String Project (including me on viola) played through a string quartet by a local composer (who I’m not going to name). As we were talking about it afterwards he said that it had been written out of, and to some extent about, his father’s death. The first two movements – fairly ‘abstract’ music, structured rather than grief-laden, even in places witty or energetic – had been written at the time, he said. The truly harrowing last movement he hadn’t been able to write until months later, and it had been four years before he was able to put the piece before anyone else even to the extent of getting a string quartet to play it.
So there is more to this perhaps than I made out those months back in a previous post. Depression, sadness and general mental turmoil can provide the material for art. But it is, I think, the mark of true difficulty – mine and anyone else’s – that the ability to cast it into artistic form only returns once the distress itself has receded somewhat. The art of the depressed, anxious etc. may sound, look or feel like a suicide note; but it is sheer silence, not expression of misery, that should cause real concern.
New set on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/martinashmusic/sets/songs-for-the-dark-night-of
It’s bedroom demos, and pretty roughshod stuff I’m afraid, even if one of them did stretch to multitracking and a click track (you would hardly be able to tell from the result though). In no way could this be called worship music, and some of it is not as such religious … but I do think it forms a coherent, and in a way artistically honest whole. And says something about some of the mental and spiritual places I inhabit at the moment. And perhaps – just perhaps – it is more important to be unworshipfully truthful than worship out of spirit and out of truth. Certainly it ought to be permitted even to ‘religious musicians’.