London Viola Player, Violinist & Arranger For Hire

Martin Ash LTCL

Monthly Archives: July 2015

Nervous tension

I normally reckon I’m virtually immune to performance nerves, in a strict sense of ‘performance’. It is possible for me to feel stressed about playing ‘live’ to some kind of audience, but usually only when I’m aware that I’m massively underprepared. I hugely prefer it to recording, even under good conditions. If I have any confidence in what I’m going to do (including believing that I can wing it adequately!), then it’s pretty reliable that my playing won’t suffer.

Auditions and performance exams are a different matter, at least since some git left the electronic piano transposing up a semitone before I took grade 4 violin, aged about 13. I will reliably undersell myself in an empty room with some poker-faced examiners, and I hate doing auditions as a result; and of course that’s a neatly self-sustaining cycle, especially as long as I’m very rarely called upon to audition – I assume I would get used to it eventually, like pretty much anything else (it can’t be harder to get into the way of than injecting insulin four times a day, right?).

A fairly new concept has thrown itself at me lately – the audition performance, you might call it, or ‘tryout’ to borrow a term from US team sport. Tomorrow (Saturday) I’m playing for a 24-hour musical – you know the sort of thing, only the directors know what it’s going to be in advance, cast, band and crew find out 24 hours before curtain up, rehearse furiously and perform (I’m losing a lot of the prep time to a festival slot with the Filthy Spectacula, but that’s another story … ), in Cwmbran, near Newport on the Welsh side of the Bristol channel. The main carrot drawing me to it is not that it will be fun or some free food (which I think I’ll also miss to the other gig), but that playing for it is acting as my audition to join the Welsh Musical Theatre Orchestra, a professional (though not very well paid) ensemble that does concert versions of musicals, operetta and material from them.

Hopefully I won’t find that too intense (and hopefully a pit band viola part won’t be all that stretching to my technique). On Tuesday, I did a short violin-piano duo set at a restaurant in the ziggurat of consumerism that is the Shepherd’s Bush Westfield shopping centre; various people were doing these over a spread of dates to get residency work (or perhaps preferential dep listing as a consolation prize) some week nights up to Christmas at four branches of a small chain.

I expected this to be a performance with a prospective boss watching. I don’t know if it was the awareness that the work would amount to a lot of one-off freelance fees, or having picked myself a moderately difficult showcase set, or playing with a pianist I’d had just one fairly brief rehearsal with, or being aware of several very technically drilled other violinists after the same jobs, but it was much more like an audition with some people eating dinner in the background. Apparently I didn’t look nervous, but I certainly felt it, and I was trapped by nerves into some significant musical errors, so by my standards I sounded it too. Low point was definitely somehow losing track of how far along the neck my left hand was about halfway through the first piece, which qualifies as a schoolboy problem by any standards. Positive I suppose that I improved, rather than collapsed, from that point; but I’m still not holding my breath for the results of that application.

It’s not going to help me make any money to keep avoiding auditions though, so I guess I’m going to have to get used to them. Any offers to sit in a small room looking impassive while I play pieces I haven’t been allowed to choose and then give emotionless feedback?

Who makes, or breaks, the rules?

Another Prom reflection post, this time back on my old hobby-horse of classical music performance practice.

A couple of nights ago’s Prom was done by the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and I highly recommend watching it online while you can, here. Several things about it were remarkable from within the context of normal orchestral practice, and it seems worth pointing them out and asking why they work, if they do.

Visually, the most striking consistent feature is the absence of a conductor as such. The opening item, Stravinsky’s concerto grosso ‘Dumbarton Oaks’, was under the nominal control of the orchestra’s leader. Admittedly, it’s virtually a large chamber work, being performed here with 15 players. Another interesting feature, though – only four of those sat down (the two cellos and two double basses, and the latter were on stools so could more be said to sit up than down). The increased flexibility of the arrangement is obvious – and it helps a great deal with cohesion, since it’s fairly easy to stand, and if necessary move, so you can see a leader on the same level as everyone else; whereas big seated orchestras inevitably lead to ranked seating for the winds, brass and percussion at the back and a high podium for the conductor.

The standing performance wasn’t sustained through the rest of the programme, which was more genuinely orchestral and so probably made it impractical (though I was slightly disappointed). However, direction duties were taken over by Leif Ove Andsnes – the piano soloist, conducting from the piano in the 3rd concerto and the Fantasia for Piano, Choir and Orchestra by Beethoven, and a choral-orchestral piece by Schonberg.

Now, it’s reasonably well-known that the non-playing baton conductor is a relatively recent invention, and it’s become a fairly common conceit for authentic performance sticklers to direct from the harpsichord while playing continuo in Baroque works. It’s less often remembered that Beethoven conducted from the piano throughout his performing career, including premieres of the first seven symphonies (which raises the interesting question of what he played!).

The Mahler Chamber Orchestra are not a period-instrument ensemble, nor are they early music specialists (the name seems a giveaway here). Mainstream, if the term can be allowed to be meaningful here, orchestras very rarely take any notice of the original absence of conductor, or likely original dimensions of ensembles, certainly for anything as late as mature Beethoven, though even Haydn or Mozart might get a reduced string section. However, they are a chamber orchestra, and with direction from the piano (a full-size concert grand, mind you) go a string section of three double basses and the rest in proportion, which sits in a very different relationship to Beethoven’s pairs of woodwind, horns, trumpets and timpani than the post-Romantic string section which can be twice the size.

The CBSO and Chorus did Beethoven’s 9th symphony about a week earlier with such a string section, in fact; and an outsize choir, and horn and woodwind parts doubled in tutti passages (as opposed to solos); which certainly pointed the contrast with the Mahler Chamber approach to the same composer. I have to admit, I have difficulty avoiding the impression that Beethoven over-eggs the pudding in the ‘Choral’, whatever its popularity with audiences and pundits alike. A vast, unmanoeuvrable ensemble dependent on their (extremely histrionic and visual) conductor to keep them together is only going to add to the impression of flab.

For older traditionalist classical string players who were trained even more thoroughly than me to use vibrato all the time, the knee-jerk association of early music performance style is (always with implied italics and exclamation mark) using no vibrato at all! This debate underwent a significant change in gear a few years back, when ‘mainstream’ conductors started coming out in favour of straight tone (ie no vibrato) – not because it was used at the time of writing such and such a piece, but because they preferred the sound.

Perhaps there is something similar about the approach to Beethoven here. There was no attempt at rigorously historical performance as such (though curiously the trumpet players were using unvalved instruments, and the flautists appeared to have wooden (but fully keyed) instruments) – but some Early Music characteristic features were adopted, presumably on sheer taste. Certainly a smaller ensemble gives greater clarity to the sound – and I think Beethoven is Classical enough to expect clarity, to expect his audiences to be able to hear everything that is going on – and makes it easier to be tighter in playing.

Which is vital when performing a concerto conducted by the soloist, perhaps particularly a piano concerto since when the pianist is playing his efforts at visually leading are more or less constrained to bending from the waist like a classical Ray Charles. There are plenty of passages, usefully including the starts of movements in general, where Ove Andsnes could and did conduct; but also plenty of long stretches where he could not, and the orchestra had to stay together by ear, by a keen individual sense of rhythm, and by watching each other.

That group engagement, as opposed to joint focus on a single figure, almost inevitably gives a visual impression of greater involvement with the music. This orchestra are also unusually given to feeling free to look like they are enjoying playing, perhaps particularly at some of the more delightfully rococo touches that Beethoven will dig out from the music of decades earlier at will. That is perhaps eased by, or perhaps simply part of the same picture as, their relatively informal dress code – the men in dark suit and tie, though the women stuck with the truly hegemonic all black. If nothing else, while the overtones of politicians, bankers and corporate managers are unfortunate, it is a look that takes the players closer to what their audience might be wearing. No one in 2015 is going to turn up to a concert wearing black or even white tie, unlike the period roughly 1890-1920 when most of what are now considered immovable classical performance norms were solidifying and it would have been de rigueur. The gap is, of course, painfully obvious at the Proms, with the nearest audience group to the stage being the promenaders, standing for the duration at (I think) £5 a head and no advance booking allowed, never mind required.

There is one other consequence of having the soloist conduct. Normal practice for concerti from the good amateur up to the top professional level at present is for the orchestra to rehearse, and the soloist to practice, and then there to be literally a couple of rehearsals together before performing. This is presumably what led to the subtly appalling effect of a Proms version of the Beethoven violin concerto I heard a couple of years ago, where the orchestra were definitely interpreting Beethoven as late Classical, and the soloist was committed to a performance of Beethoven as seminal Romantic. It seems little short of inevitable that Ove Andsnes directed the rehearsals, as well as the concert, of the pieces he conducted. Inherently, this marks a break from the implicit understanding of a concerto as a solo accompanied by unimportant following music, towards an idea (common with the origins of the form at least) of it as being for a group including one or more particularly vital members (the soloist/s). If you have rehearsed together all the way, then the solo and orchestral parts are not detachable; inevitably decisions about phrasing and delivery will tend to be uniform where both have the same, or versions of the same, material; the performance is integrated, something which actually demands humility of the soloist to view himself as not personally playing all the bits of the piece that really matter (though in this case by way of compensation he gets to have complete artistic control rather than a power-sharing agreement with a pesky conductor).

There are two different, but not entirely separable, things going on here. One is the appearance of being engaged – personally and emotionally – with the music being played, which to any audience not entirely used to the genre is vital to the understanding that they too can engage with it. If everyone involved looks like a stuffed shirt being operated on invisible strings by the bloke (and it almost always is a bloke still, unlike player numbers which are getting pretty even) who stands with his back to you, then the ‘difficult’ nature of art music remains much more unbreached – a ‘difficulty’ which does not seem to have been felt to any similar extent by the rather vacuous and gossipy salon society of Regency England, or Vienna at the same time.

The other is simply a concept that steps onward in time are not necessarily forward in achievement. Historically accurate performance for its own sake has a bad reputation, and sometimes deservedly (though there are plenty of people, and I am often one, who honestly think pre-nineteenth-century music sounds better for a lot of the Early Music movement’s restorations). But it has taken the historically-informed movement to issue a serious challenge to the way pre-modernist music sounds in performance. Composers could demand special effects, lack of vibrato, specific unusual numbers of musicians, and so on as much as they like, but it did not reshape how anyone else’s music was played. The experiments of trimming down the enormous Edwardian symphony orchestra, exploring ranges of tone that had been out of fashion a couple of generations previously, and experimenting with varying forms of musical leadership come from backward-looking rather than forward-looking research, but truly bear fruit in being adopted by performers without a historicist agenda, and appreciated by audiences who are not informed purists.

Plus, no one really wants to have to play the violin wearing a bow tie, they just put up with it. The instrument always knocks the thing crooked anyway.

Mhairi Black and why the SNP matters to English politics

So this 20-year-old’s first speech in Westminster has been getting a lot of social and traditional mainstream media attention. Which few speeches that don’t have direct policy import (Budget, Queen’s Speech, that sort of thing) do. If you know me, you know my first response (well before, say, watching the videos) is to ask why.

It might be because she’s Britain’s youngest ever woman MP, and youngest MP regardless of gender for centuries. But I doubt that’s most of it. Dare I say if she looked a little more like Louise Mensch this might be a bigger factor.

It’s probably quite largely because of the straight-talking rhetoric, significantly different to the normal buzzword selection of Westminster rabble-rousing. The line about being the only 20-year-old in the country the Chancellor is interested in helping to house is already working its way into political history.

But I think there are two other, intertwined factors: party affiliation and content.

The SNP have provided some much-needed lightening of the Westminster tone since suddenly going from a barely present huddle of MPs to the third largest group in Parliament – taking gleeful selfies in the chamber, refusing to abide by various forms of traditional but uncodified behaviour, etc. But this shouldn’t distract observers from their real importance – and neither should the issue after which they are named, seeing that there is clearly more to the phenomenon than that.

The recent rise of the Scottish National Party has been little less than meteoric. That remains the case despite the No vote in the independence referendum and despite not ending up as Westminster kingmakers. A reminder: in a proportional representation Scottish Parliament, they managed to survive a full term as a minority government (with the UK-wide parties generally minded to oppose a lot of their policies), and then get elected to an absolute majority off the back of it. Single-party absolute majorities are notoriously rare in PR systems. Their membership is something like five times what it was three years ago – a rise that has taken place mostly immediately after the referendum defeat that many assumed (and I tended to be one) might kill the party altogether, or at least divide it too permanently to be a significant political force for decades. And they now hold 56 out of 59 Scottish Westminster seats, sitting between the really big two well into triple figures, and everyone else including the Lib Dems with eight MPs or less.

There is therefore a governing record to look at as well as a rhetorical one. And while the SNP performance in Holyrood government is certainly not perfect, it is presumably the driving force behind a fair bit of their election success since their first governing term. It can be summed up quite easily: genuine left-wing. They have abolished prescription charges, kept university fee-free, and generally pursued a big-state, high-tax high-spend, socialist-liberal governing agenda wherever they have had control and Scottish independence has not been at issue.

In this context, Black’s attack on cuts to housing benefit is true to party line. But it’s also true to a lot of thinking grassroots frustration across the UK, and I think this is the other large part of its appeal.

Westminster, at least until the de facto arrival of the SNP, has been getting heavily stuck in a centre-right consensus that increasingly seems more right than centre. Voices questioning the efficacy of austerity as a response to recession have been condemned to the lunatic fringe. The Labour party has responded to the increasing success of the increasingly far right by moving to the right in the belief that the voters are there, rather than to the left in a bid to offer a genuine alternative. Cameron has somehow managed to pass off policies and actions which are often by any objective measure more extreme than anything carried out by the infamous Thatcher as managerial, sensible safe-pair-of-hands decisions.

Frustration at General Election polling is nothing new. But the problem of what to vote with a left-leaning set of ideas was particularly acute. The Lib Dems, after a term as junior coalition partner, looked not very liberal, somewhat questionably democratic and decidedly a spent political force. Labour were so little the labour party that they were trying to resist the label ‘Red’ applied to their own leader – how did no one in the political classes comment on the idiocy of this?! Quite a lot of Green votes (including my own) were cast in seats where the candidate had no real prospect of winning – and probably more would have been if there was no likelihood of thereby helping a Tory or even UKIP candidate into parliament.

The Scots, of course, if they felt this way, had a solution. They voted SNP (along with, seemingly, most of the rest of Scotland).

The SNP, particularly during and since the referendum campaign, have emphasised the degree to which they are out of step with the Westminster-based parties, playing themselves up as a real alternative. It’s a PR ploy of course, but it does represent some reality of policies beyond the independence question too.

Most of the people I’m in contact with through social media and the web are of course broadly like myself – middle-class-ish liberal lefties, quite possibly neo-hippies, quite a lot Christian (of a not very evangelical persuasion generally), and very few Scots. They don’t represent the country. But they do represent a certain demographic. And I think the core of the reason I encounter the video of Mhairi Black’s maiden speech several times a day is that amidst Greece providing a worked example of austerity not working and the Labour interim leader advocating non-resistance to various welfare cuts, it represents a line of thought, opinion, values, belief and, actually, evidence-based reasoning much closer to their own than almost anything else being said in Parliament (honourable exception for Caroline Lucas).

I would vote No in a Scottish independence referendum without hesitation. But I’d happily vote SNP in a government election.

Many strings to many bows

It bears repeating that what used to be the session musician business is now the live backing band business. Observing what goes on with hired hands in high-profile gigs is therefore as useful to my career reflections as reading album performance credits.

One thing that is really striking in both cases is the degree of multi-instrumentalism going on. You might think that you would set out going ‘right, for this gig we need to hire a string quartet, two keyboards, and three backing vocals. Oh, and some additional percussion. Let’s hire them’. But there seems to be much more of an iterative / evolutionary process going on (probably involving a lot of rehiring known performers) in practice. Tambourine-shaking backing singers and BVs-providing keyboardists are fairly standard. But there’s no particular reason why someone should play keyboards and guitar or bass more than any other two instruments (except the popularity of all three I suppose) – yet it’s a commonly found live combination.

For his Glastonbury set, Hozier (I’m not ashamed of watching that coverage; actually I’m not ashamed to have enjoyed it to, though perhaps particularly the bluesy mid-set chunk with open tunings and slides in evidence) had a drummer and two female backing vocalists plus a trio of multi-instrumentalists ringing the changes: one doing bass, keys and (male) vocs; one keys, guitar and (female) vocs; and one cello, keys and (female) vocs. That surely must have at least partly come out of wanting particular people and splitting the set between them, or at least evolving the instrumentation partly to suit the lineup, rather than just ticking the boxes of what the recorded version requires to be played live.

Session credits can be equally lengthy; there are a handful of additional musicians on the most recent Bird Eats Baby album, which I’ve been listening to lately, and the producer is credited with (I think) synths, electronics, additional percussion, additional guitars and additional vocals, while the most adaptable of the other players covers additional violin, viola and additional vocals.

All of which makes my violin-viola double look a little restricted if I’m really serious about this, and think the non-classical world will provide some serious income not just fun pocket-money jobs. Maybe I should have some singing lessons, for the first time in my life. Or do some really serious guitar practice.

A little less division, a little more combination

Glastonbury and Proms season is always a good time for me to sit around catching up on BBC live coverage via iPlayer and finding inspiration for blog musings, even if my efforts to justify it as research for my music career don’t really hold water.

Here’s something about how we think of music in the 21st century West. We’ve got very good at labelling ever-more-specific genres, sounds and groupings. There’s a separate post to be written on why and how that continues to happen, but I’m going to be good and leave it on one side. Let’s just take the fact as read.

And doubtless that has its uses, in terms of describing music (useful when promoting it, selling it, hiring bands, finding like-minded individuals, etc.), organising music shops and download lists (why browse through 2 000 ‘metal’ bands when you could jump straight to ‘melodic postgrindcore’ and find the six you’re looking for?), and from a more corporate Orwellian point of view profiling and targeting audiences, or rather purchasers.

But, as musicians, I’m not sure that it is a useful tool. Certainly for anyone interested in big trends, in what the common threads of some of those sounds, or even those ideas and looks are, in trying to pull out specifics to use somewhere else, in trying to perhaps position their ideas, or the ideas their looking for, within a wider tradition, microlabelling is counterproductive. Precisely because it splinters and subdivides, rather than unifying and giving a sense of descent, linkage and commonality.

What we’re not all that good at is having words for bigger conglomerations – metagenres if you like. ‘Rock’ is pretty much the only really good example, something that fairly satisfactorily covers a massively wide range of largely guitar-led, largely loudish and fastish and rhythm/accompanying figure-driven rather than melody-driven music over something like 60 years and counting.

But there are others that would be very useful to have. ‘Jazz’ is already such a wide term that some people find it more or less meaningless. But it would be useful at times to be able to think about a wider tradition of music heavy on improvisation, controlled dissonance and syncopation that would include jazz and blues and shade over into inter-war Broadway, jam rock (Miles Davis had an intense mutual influence on The Grateful Dead) and probably more.

And there’s a crucial lineage for thinking about a surprising amount of very good contemporary music, and surprisingly effective and natural collaborations and crossovers, which doesn’t have a term behind it at all that I’ve identified. It’s quite hard to even write about without risking sounding racialist or worse, so please read the following paragraphs with more of an eye to my argument than hairtrigger terminology.

I think the musical roots of this tree are in gospel. I mean, you can trace gospel back into lots of things and it’s very interesting, but it’s a sensible place to start this story in terms of sounds and practices and effects. From gospel, with startlingly little intervention besides a wholesale change from religious to secular lyrics, comes soul. It has an intensity that was probably partly borrowed from rhythm and blues / jive / rock’n’roll even – but that spectrum had been covertly cross-feeding without either side being willing to admit to it for probably decades by the time recognisable ‘soul’ started to be made. You only have to listen to those hammering pianos, swelling Hammond organs (much more affordable and available than a pipe organ for independent charismatic churches in the South!) and perching on the border of singing and shouting to realise that I’ve deliberately made this sentence applicable to either side of the sacred-secular divide.

And then what’s interesting is that lots and lots; and lots … and lots of music, very broadly though very far from exclusively descending from black US communities, comes out of that pool of sounds and remains essentially compatible with all of its cousins if you bring them together, at least the better-crafted and more durable instances. Rock-n-roll, of course, went off and did its thing, mostly in loose company with the blues, but I’m talking about the soul branch, if you like.

Soul, of course, gives birth to funk, and they are never clearly differentiated from the start. But DJs playing funk (and the whole fertile world of African-American performance speech, mostly essentially poetry, mostly at least partially improvised; and the material conditions of 1970s housing projects) inspired, then invented hip-hop almost by accident. Meanwhile funk/soul in a more music industry world evolved through disco and heaven knows what else to give rise to RnB (in the modern sense of the word) and half a dozen other ‘urban’ genres – which, in this century at least, crosspollinate merrily back and forth with the more speech-and-recording-manipulation oriented world of hip-hop, rap and its variants and derivatives.

The point at which the continuity of the whole lot becomes visible is when some of the chronology gets jumbled by the arrival of neo-soul in (I think) the early 2000s. People like Joss Stone went out of their way to sound as mush like their idols as possible – in some cases down to recording in the same location, mixing and mastering entirely on analogue tape, doing everything in live takes rather than overdubs and splices. As a bit of a novelty fad turned into a lasting genre (along with its most creative and effective proponents), strict turn-back-time practice changed to more flexible ‘enjoyment of the good’.

And then it turned out that you could mash up this apparently slightly middle-class, self-conscious poised music with ‘raw, gritty’ urban stuff and it came out with neither of them sounding strangled.

Mark Ronson first came to fame as a DJ, and remains often associated with the electronic realm of producers and samples (indeed, he still works a lot as a DJ). But in the cover of (Merseyside retro indie rockers the Zutons’) ‘Valerie’, he produced one of neo-soul’s once and future queen Amy Winehouse’s greatest hits.

Pharrell Williams comes very much from an urban context, and is not neo anything, simply contemporary. His ‘Happy’ will probably go down as one of the runaway hits of the decade. But one of the most insightful critical comments on it I’ve come across said that it ‘could have been written any time in the last 50 years’. I think it’s true. The production and to some extent the arrangement are of their time, more or less. But the underlying song, with its blue note seventh chords, call-and-response chorus, euphoric trumpet-call high notes from the male lead voice, and verse-chorus structure, could have come out of 60s Motown without sounding much different.

Rather tellingly, when Paloma Faith (less often labelled as ‘neo-soul’, but it would be a largely accurate description) did her co-composition with Williams at Glastonbury, she introduced it saying ‘you might not realise this, but this song is actually a collaboration between me and Pharrell Williams’. And in truth you wouldn’t necessarily realise it. It’s a good song, but it doesn’t stick out of her set from her solo compositions – it’s another uninhibited, well-crafted, energetic reworking of the materials of funk and soul into the worldview of a realist-optimist young woman from scummiest millennial Hackney. I imagine it would sound pretty much equally natural (though very different, and probably without the (self-?) choreographed backing singers and horn section) if she did it as a guest in a Pharrell gig.

There are other areas I could look at – the whole question of the interaction of British and American (and other) ‘folk’ and singer-songwriter traditions; the counter-example of ‘classical’ as metagenre, and its more often ignored sub- and subsubgenres; the country ‘family’, its distinctions from and interlinkings with other US-based popular streams. But I’ve perhaps written enough, and I certainly should be getting some sleep. Suffice to say this topic not only intrigues me but is, I think, played out in a great many collaborations and fusions producing exciting music – from The Mothership Returns, to Faith and Williams, to the String Project in the current Pieman era …

Crunching the numbers

Like it or not, being a freelance musician has to be a business and a career as well as a vocation.

And like any business, the startup period was pretty financially fraught. A lot of money went out on setup costs, from business cards to a video showreel, and ventures that didn’t pay off. Income took a while to start coming in, and grew slowly. Unsurprisingly, I cut costs where I could to try and bring the numbers together.

Nonetheless, I ran an unambiguous deficit for the first seven months, pulling successive support packages out of my ever-svelter-looking savings and wondering if it was going to work.

April was a disappointment – I had hoped to turn the financial corner but my chosen measure (money in and out of my bank account, because I can add it up and I’m never going to try and track all my cash spending, even if I need to track cash income for my sense of ethical responsibility even to the taxman) showed I was about ten quid short. May, though, did provide the first point I’d actually saved some money, even if it was only about enough to buy a train ticket to Liverpool.

June was an exceptional month – I don’t expect to maintain being that busy, given I gigged two or three times most weekends and had a few midweek gigs as well, plus getting some money in from transcribing / arranging work. It might be for the best if I don’t have quite that much on alongside my part-time desk job to be honest! However, it is the first time I’ve been really happy about the financials of working as a musician. If I did keep that rate of work up, I could probably have filled the hole in my savings back in by the spring, which would be quite enough to aim at for the moment.

Of course, caution is required. Breaking even is one thing, but it won’t let me save for a deposit (if I thought I could ever get a mortgage without moving to outer small town nowhere and buying a car, meaning – oh yes, more expenses). And the majority of my income is still coming from my desk job. I would like to contemplate going full-time with music; but just because I’m making more than I spend in the part-time arrangement doesn’t prove it would work.

Nonetheless, financial insecurity is apparently one of the leading barriers to freedom from anxiety and stress, and against the odds, I might just be able to cross that one off for the moment.