London Viola Player, Violinist & Arranger For Hire

Martin Ash LTCL

Monthly Archives: February 2015

A very long weekend

I was going to write about Sunday today.

But then this video from Saturday popped up in my news feed and I thought it was too good to pass up. So, ladies and gentlemen, your attention please, for, their first time on camera – The Filthy Spectacula!

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10155191451830296

Enjoy – and let it tempt you to come and see us live – in Camden this month, Liverpool at Easter or one of our various festival slots over the summer!

At the Thunderbolt, Bristol. Video by Mel Cook.

Get up to much at the weekend?

This is the inevitable first theing on a Monday colleague question (even if, like me, you don’t get into the office until about 1pm). So here’s part of the answer …

Well, on Saturday I got a lift from a brewery to Bristol (continuing the alliterative theme, the brewery’s called Bingham’s and it’s where the Filthy Spectacula’s bassist works). This was to play at a birthday party (more alliteration! my life is turning slowly into Piers Plowman!).

I can’t remember the last time, if ever, I played for money at a private party (well, unless you want to count string quartet at weddings, which is a bit different, especially if you’re playing during the ceremony rather than the reception). Nor the last time, if ever, I came across a birthday party at a music venue – not a bar or a pub function room, but booking out the whole of a bona fide gig venue. It’s also quite unusual as a band to be the only live act playing a given night.

Despite all of which novelty, and it being only our third gig, and having been asked to provide an hour set (and we just about managed it!) when we previously hadn’t done much over 30 minutes, it was an absolutely cracking gig and the bits of the audience we could see appeared to love it (most importantly, the birthday girl!) – in a testimony partly to being a very visual band, Facebook seems to have been flooded with photos since, in most of which my bow at least is blurred from how fast I was playing. All right, and long exposures due to low ambient light helped. Don’t mess with my act.

Three gigs in, a certain amount of my stage persona with the Spectacula is taking shape already. There’s the weaving around, power-lunges, ‘riding’ chugging strings of notes, ‘firing’ the fiddle on stab chords, elbowing the lead singer out of centre stage for solos – all more or less copped from daft heavy lead guitarists. There’s also the intermittent bits of knock-off clog dancing (well I wear hiking boots onstage with these guys – what other dancing can you do in those?!), mostly when I’m not playing … and the wandering into the front of the audience for some of the longer or flashier solos. Further proof, by the way, of the solid dependable value of the Headway Band pickup – I’ve never had any trouble with it feeding back even well in front of front-of-house speakers. Crowds evidently love it (there’s usually some bloke doing the Wayne’s World ‘We are not worthy!’ reverence!) but it’s trickier than it looks.

Firstly, there’s the matter of getting on and off. The arrangements are fixed enough in these songs that I’ll generally have a very specific amount of time to wrap up before the next verse / chorus / whatever. And the odds that I’ll have to sing backing at least at some point in that section are fairly high, though it’s not guaranteed by a long chalk. That means I have to time getting back on stage and behind a mike stand. Secondly, so far I’m sticking to a straightforward jack lead from the fiddle pickup. So I have to judge how far I can get on it before being yanked back or suddenly finding myself playing acoustically. I should probably try walking gently forward around setup / soundcheck so I know where’s safe, but I haven’t got round to it yet. Then I also have to try not to get the wire round my legs, particularly when jumping on and off stage. The stage last night was about two foot off the floor – low still, but more than the mini-risers that were all the obstacle at the first two gigs. You don’t want to trip and go flying, in mid-performance, with about £700 worth of fragile musical equipment in your hands and no spares, however good an insurance deal you got with Musicians’ Union membership.

The logical solution is, of course, a wireless belt pack. 10-metre range, nothing to get in the way, if you do go too far you’ll lose signal and fade out rather than ending up on your back or unplugged and you can just jump back into range. But of course they’re not free. Somewhat oddly, I would probably have gone for it if I was still purely amateur – not so much because I was earning more as because of less literal ideas about return on investment. But at this point, when I can gig reasonably with what I’ve got, and music is tending not to pay for itself plus its share of living costs (certainly not bands, with the cost of rehearsal rooms and forward investment in recording and merch to be made back out of fees split), RoI seems like it should be quite black-and-white and I shouldn’t buy the radio gear till the band gigs have paid for it. I’ll have to stick to jumping off stage carefully, like a responsible and clear-headed rocker. Er …

So that was Saturday. Sunday can have another post I think.

Inside jobs and outside interests

So there’s a very useful Facebook group called ‘Need orchestral / session players? Ask here!’. It’s got me quite a few of my orchestral dep jobs and generally probably more work than any of the other dep / muso needed groups I’m in or websites I’ve joined. All of which said, of course, there is a high level of stuff that’s irrelevant or uninteresting to me (like everyone looking for a French horn player, or based north of about Birmingham, for instance).

The other day I logged in and there were two new adverts there. One was for string players for Tchaikovsky’s first piano concert and the Bernstein Symphonic Dances from West Side Story. Apparently being promoted solely by the (student?) conductor, as there was the disclaimer ‘I can’t afford to pay anyone a fee, but drinks will be on me in the RAM bar afterwards’. Now this, with minor variations, happens fairly often, and he did say he was looking for ‘probably music students, but solid amateurs also welcome’ – in other words, there was no pretence this was a professional gig. But I’ve read through the Bernstein, admittedly several years ago, and they would be very solid amateurs to perform it on presumably one rehearsal on the day. It’s just plain hard to play, for lots of reasons. It seems a tall order, and almost a piece of vanity, to decide to do something so difficult (and I don’t imagine the Tchaikovsky is a piece of cake either) when you know you can’t pay anything out for musicians. I suspect the choice has more to do with a conducting career and CV than anything else – and as a jobbing musician rather than a career-launching student, I find it sad when performances are driven by ‘I want to have conducted/played/sung that in public’ rather than ‘audiences would like to / should have the opportunity to hear that live’.

The second advert was for a new marketing / management agency, with the usual spiel about being musician-run and focused on getting the best possible talent and performances first and foremost and so on and so forth. The interesting bit was that having been initially started and road-tested in I think two or three of the London music schools, they were now expanding to another nine conservatoires across England. Yes, you guessed the implication correctly – they recruit solely from among current conservatoire students, and by the look of it by application not (or at least well before) by audition.

Now someone with an Oxford First would be definitely letting himself in for accusations of hypocrisy if he acquired a habit of inverted snobbery about people having impressive qualifications versus having marketplace ability. But it sticks in my throat to have idealistic music-for-music’s-sake pure-performance-priority values proclaimed and then the cold policy: You want to be with us, you need to be heading for getting a conservatoire degree. I’m not saying they should start talent-hunting rappers and acoustic guitarists off the Tube busking pitches; but is it really answerable to their supposed goals to exclude any good classical performers who may be able to present a convincing CV and do a good audition but don’t have the ‘right’ background?

What it does achieve, of course, is keeping costs of recruitment (or at least selection) down, in a context where the agency probably anticipate having an oversupply of useable talent applications as it is and an undersupply of either inhouse resource to process them or opportunities with which to place them. Flicking through the MU handbook the other day, I came across a reference to many young UK classical musicians going abroad for initial orchestral experience and then returning with much better employment prospects. This suggests that in the orchestral world at least (and perhaps others?) the UK flooded market for musicians is a geographical exception (how else would it be easier to get work overseas?), something I had not at all expected.

I don’t think I’m quite ready to sacrifice a reliable if dull and draining part-time day job to a European symphony orchestra post yet (even if I was able to bag one of the latter). But every call for unpaid musicians or for conservatoire students and graduates only pushes me a little closer to it.

Popularity contests

So last night The Filthy Spectacula had a gig, first support at a venue in Brick Lane (hipster central, I’m assured) for a slot on a mini UK tour by an Austrian indie rock (their description) band with a first album to promote.

After the fairly red-blooded rock-n-roll atmosphere of the Good Ship in Kilburn, it was actually a little bit of a shock. Firstly, a fair bit of the audience space was taken up with leather sofas. Very nice but not very live gig to my mind unless it’s going to be sort of vocal-lead downtempo jazz or something. Second and much more surprising, almost all the audience stayed seated on those throughout our set, which I think counts as an act of self-control with not just our musical style but us barking at them to drink and dance at intervals! – some apparently engrossed in their phones and one in the front couch row pulling out a magazine.

The second support were more or less the full band version of a singer-songwriter, very earnest young man stuff, not particularly striking to me but probably very much in tune with the venue and location. They certainly seemed to have brought a moderately substantial following. Shock number two: by a couple of numbers into the following set, the entire second support band and almost all of their fanbase had left, seemingly choosing an early night or at least an early exit over getting their money’s worth on the door charge or actually hearing the headline act of the night.

This was a shame, as I personally thought the headliners Charlywood were a lot more fun, more stylish and generally better. Their initially fairly straight-down-the-line indie sound moved quite quickly to incorporate large chunks of funk/soul and glam/cock-rock, and was all the better for it. Nonetheless they played their closing couple of numbers to the sound guy, the bar girl, their frontman’s girlfriend, and the rump three of the Filthy Spectacula entourage (me, our bassist and his wife). Which was a shame.

One of the real problems of live music at the moment is a difficulty getting people out of their homes away from Netflix, cable TV and supermarket-price booze and into music venues with a door charge and expensive beer in plastic cups (on any night, never mind a Wednesday). The lure of live music and loyalty to the idea of going to a gig don’t tend to do it unless it’s to see an act who were big stars when you were in your teens or at uni; the stronger bond of going to support your mate’s band is often what tips the balance. This is only reinforced by logical and practical but not very artistic commercial practices like demanding each punter declares an affiliation to one band on the bill when they arrive so that the door take can be split accordingly. But of course the result is that the mentality is not so much ‘I’m going to a gig’ as ‘I’m going to see Jack’s band’ – and the interest in getting there before Jack’s on or staying after he comes off is correspondingly reduced, as is the engagement with any other acts you may be around for. Evidently east London was a bit far for anyone to come from Austria.

I was going to go on a rant about how the Brick Lane experience indicates most gigging bands (and in fact a lot of other musicians, as profit share arrangements are increasingly common in barely-money-making classical music as well) are paid not according to their musical ability but their marketing skills. But actually that’s in the right direction but not quite on target. Since getting people you don’t have a personal link to into your gigs is so difficult without real reputational pull, marketing activity can be very low return on investment. All too often, the real aspect of an act that determines the size and enthusiasm of the audience for their set, and probably the financial take (depending on the arrangement for the event) is simply how many of their friends are within range and sufficiently emotionally dependent …

Please will you be my friend? … :-p

Instrument swapping

There was a period – probably a couple of months – where the music ‘work’ (in a fairly broad sense) I was doing kept me doing a quite neatly balanced amount of playing violin and viola. Broadly, I was doing one-off classical jobs on viola (lots of practising orchestral parts!) and band practices on violin (using the pickup, quite a lot of writing my own parts, playing from memory / by ear / improvising, a lot more emphasis on the looks of the thing). Not an even distribution as such, but a division of labour that kept me in training on both.

That’s changed this month. Partly because I happen to have a period of a lot of band gigs (four in the course of February) and not much orchestral work (nothing between last weekend and mid-March at the moment); also because the freelance work I have picked up has temporarily swung to violin – both the just gone opera job and a St Patrick’s gig doing solo Irish folk and sitting in with a function band. At present the only viola job I’ve got in the diary is a choral/orchestral concert six weeks away which I won’t have the music to for probably five weeks.

So what’s the big deal with that? I hear you ask. Well, between you, me and the whole of the public internet, I tend to be rather reactive about music practice. Most of the time, I practice almost exclusively for the upcoming performances / recordings. Just working on technique or polishing up a solo repertoire rarely grabs my attention – there tend to be so many other things to do, like updating my blog, and doing laundry, and my part-time desk job, and sleeping …

And while violin and viola are similar (compared to the difference between, say, guitar and flute), they’re not so similar as to be able to leave one on one side for two months to play the other and then come back to it without a drop in standard – particularly if I want to play sympathetically to the inherent qualities of the instruments, rather than just produce the right notes. (As my viola-playing father always insists, and I entirely agree, a viola is not a violin transposed down a fifth!)

The frontman (if he’s human – I’m not sure) of the Filthy Spectacula asked me in a recent practice ‘What can you play?’. I reeled off various things that I can get a tune or some chords out of more or less, then pointed out that the more important question might be what do I own: I can make a passable fist of mandolin, for instance, but I’ve never owned one, so it would be a big ask to want me to play it in band gigs to change the sound up!

It’s fashionable to talk about the ‘time-rich’ and the ‘money-rich’ as if it was a zero-sum, and those with no money to spare must have time on their hands. That’s not a good principle, and nor is the reverse that the wealthy have no spare time or effort. But while I certainly can’t afford the money to own all the instruments I can sort of play (‘Hello. I’d like to buy a bass guitar, a mandolin, a mandocello, a ukelele, a bouzouki, a double bass, a djembe and a tambourine please … oh, and a melodica. Is credit card all right?’), I think I will need to muster the time to make sure I can really play the instruments I own good examples of. (The cheap tin whistle can probably deal with staying neglected in a drawer for a bit longer.)

Like buses

I remember when a couple of December bookings had been cancelled on me sitting thinking ‘this is the busiest month for musicians; if I’m ending up with not much now then the January slump’s going to be about enough to assure me I can’t do this professionally.’

Well, from the 1st of February … this week was pretty much non-stop: band practice Monday evening, band practice Tuesday evening, band practice Wednesday daytime, opera rehearsal Thursday afternoon / evening, opera rehearsal Friday afternoon, opera performance Friday evening. The coming one is shaping up interestingly: band gigs Wednesday and Saturday, then music video shooting Sunday. My favourite, though, is in three weeks’ time, when my weekend runs: Friday 20th – gig with The String Project; Saturday 21st – gig with The Filthy Spectacula; Sunday 22nd – completing music video shoot. All I can say is, the video company had better have good coffee and a good makeup artist after gigging two nights running and the second one in London!

I’m not complaining really, of course. Getting a steady supply of gigs is half the battle of staying the course semi-pro (the other half, so far still somewhat shakier, is getting paid a good amount for them), and at least that seems to be working on about a 4/5 jobs a month level for the moment – and let’s be honest, that might well be the most I can easily fit around my part-time day job. And it can certainly only be good that the trend’s upwards from 2014 into 2015; whether it’ll stay that way it’s too early to say, but here’s hoping for not too many more anxious waits for anything suitable to come up!