London Viola Player, Violinist & Arranger For Hire

Martin Ash LTCL

Monthly Archives: February 2020

New Endeavours

This is a still from Endeavour, season 7, episode 3; broadcast Sunday evening (23 Feb) and currently still available on-demand from ITV’s website:

Now you might have to just take my word for it, but the head behind the stand light just to your right of the conductor is mine.

So I’m taking this (and all the unused or not-including-me footage from the same day’s shooting) as my TV acting début, as well as my first paid job on baroque viola. Follow-ups to both would be welcomed!

Certain employees of London Metropolitan Orchestra spent a day back in 2019 at a theatre in Wimbledon pretending to be pit musicians for a baroque opera in 1970 Venice. Fun backstage fact – the series had commissioned a (compressed but still substantial) mock-baroque opera from soundtrack composer Matthew Crowe; not only did he conduct a different lineup of the same orchestra in a period-instrument, A415 recording of the ‘entire’ work, but also conducted the onstage cast and pit mimers in the filmed scenes (with real sheet music used in the recording, as well as excellent white gloves on his part, black tie on ours and baroque instruments including my viola … ).

In many ways, a lot of this was a day of waiting around being treated well – I mean, not star well, but free tea and coffee, fruit and biscuits, hair and makeup (quite some time spent making my hair even more Seventies with definition and regularity), and the breaks laid down by Equity rules.

Things you might not think of:

Even for those actually in focus and acting, TV and film acting is an incredibly repetitive business. Most desirable camera angles put the camera in shot in most other angles. So you don’t have to just get the stretch from one cut to another right once. You have to get it right, and the same right, as many times as the director thinks they might possibly want camera angles, while those successive angles are taken. And the shots will largely be ordered by what is in the same setting and involves minimal work to transition between. Much less sense of progression and situation than stage acting, where at least you get to go through everything in order without repetitions in performances.

Money is an obvious factor even to those with no involvement in the production-business side. They had one day’s occupation of the theatre: get everything done, no matter how late we finish, and don’t take chances, because we can’t come back and do more if there’s a hole at editing stage. Within that, someone had had the task of estimating how long shooting with the extras (including musicians) might take at a minimum; which was the number of hours stated on the contract and paid full rate. But no one really expected it to be quite that quick; in the end the musicians did an extra 2 hours paid at the higher overtime rate in half-hourly increments. (I should point out that once you are working at this sort of level, the rates and contractual terms have been tightly negotiated by industry bodies and unions so the only flexibility the producers would have that they stand any chance of getting away is to pay over the odds for some inscrutable reason … ) It cost more than if they had contracted us for that long to start with; but if they had finished in less than contracted time, they would still have had to pay us for all of it, and there’s an unsurprising reluctance to pay people literally to do nothing, not even to hang around waiting to work (I was tickled to find a separate rate and item for costume/hair/makeup/general prep before being ready to be called for camera-roll!).

Everyone knows a lot is shot that isn’t used in the final edit, but I don’t think most of us (me at least) realised quite how much doesn’t make it from the set to the public. Someone told me when I was a teenager that there’s 24 hours of unused footage (not even used in director’s cuts, alternate releases etc.) from The Wicker Man used as construction landfill under a bypass somewhere in northern England; I’m now only surprised there isn’t more, although a lot of it is probably one or other of the cast coming out with a perfectly reasonable line, just one phrased differently to the take on camera D … and so on.

In the meantime, I got my day earning decent money for hanging around and playing some viola on a TV set; and my attention needs to switch as ever to the next gig. Well, I know what the next gig is, but the next on-screen gig or the next baroque viola gig would be nice. So let me know what’s going …

Turning over a new page

(which is what a ‘leaf’ is in the proverbial phrase – as in ‘interleaved’)

It’s the common lot of musicians (indeed, probably all performers) to end up with their personal and professional lives bleeding into each other, and particularly so on social media. However, I’ve been starting to feel that maybe there should be a places where my music work can be discovered as a single body that are kept fairly well insulated from rants about public transport, noisy children and ecological short-sightedness, or indeed photos of cats I’ve visited lately. Which is rather the point of having a personal profile and a page as a performer, even if I wouldn’t want one that only covered ‘solo projects’ (it would be very quiet and exclude the vast majority of my work as a musician!).

So roll up, roll up for the new musical communications channel: Facebook Page ‘Martin Ash Music‘ (told you I was going for inclusive).

Please do pop over and have a look, give it a like, even share it with people you know – at present something like 97% of the people who have liked it are in fact my ‘friends’ (all these innocent nouns that have become technical terms!) on Facebook as well, and it will be more useful as a means of finding work and a way of convincing prospective clients I have reputation and appeal if it garners more widespread attention. Which is not to say I would look dimly on friend requests from anyone I know or who is even moderately likely to be involved in continuing my music career in future …

4 bazillion weddings (and)

Later today, I’m off to my first wedding of 2020. In 2018, I was at four. In 2019, my Google calendar makes it to have been 26.

I think I was only a guest at one of those; all the rest I was working. And while honourable mentions should go to Giardino Strings and The Mechanics for some of the bookings (and, in both cases, some non-wedding gigs too), the vast majority of last year’s jobs, and today’s, are with Miracle Cure.

The USP of this band is doing both standard pop/rock/covers material as a two-guitar four-piece, and also (when the extra cash is forthcoming) Irish songs (trad and well-known covers) and a few jigs and reels with a fiddle player added (me, or quite often my once and future colleagues Alleya or Maria).

One of the best things about that is that the crowd is usually at least a quarter Irish. And my observation is that culturally the Irish at a party – any party – don’t take themselves too seriously, are very difficult to embarrass, and are always up for a drink, a dance and a laugh. Which makes them a great crowd to play to for a function band. (You have a captive and usually tipsy audience at a wedding, but they may still sit in the shadowy corners of the tasteful lighting, chat and ignore you. Plus there are times when I watch a group of 30-something English punters on a dancefloor and just think of Jessie J: ‘Why’s everybody so serious? / Got their heels so high they can’t even have fun’. At my favourite wedding gigs, the couple have actually laid on baskets of cheap flip-flops to leave by the band and pre-empt excuses for not dancing!)

The double-edged sword of a Miracle Cure gig is they usually put all the Irish stuff in the second set, and so I turn up halfway through and set up in the break. On the plus side, I’m on site for less than half the time the rest of the band are and I do less sitting around (though I think all of us who play fiddle with Miracle Cure are gradually sliding into the non-Irish material just for the hell of it, though in principle it’s optional and I haven’t yet tried, let alone succeeded in, working out a part to ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’). On the minus, I have to try and hit the ground running, because there isn’t really time in one set to warm up gradually, at gone 9pm, after a lengthy journey (pretty much anyone paying up for a live 5-piece at their reception is also having their wedding at a country house / hotel-type venue in the middle of nowhere), when the other musicians and punters have been at it for at least an hour. It can be intense. And the ratio of travelling to playing time can be unusual!

But, take it all in all, I get wedding pay for fairly straightforward work. And the sheer density of bookings (there were often two lineups out on the same night last year) speaks to the success of the project and the happiness of clients. Density of bookings also meant Miracle Cure paid a lot of my rent in the second half of last year. So you can expect there to be a lot more times in 2020 where I’m flailing away at my best fake trad Irish fiddle, and then posing in the obligatory pre-encore band-and-crowd selfie:

Alone again, un/naturally

When is busking a gig, and when is a gig busking? Is the critical feature location, or means of payment?

On Thursday, I was at International Quarter London in Stratford for an hour at lunchtime. More specifically, I was standing in the location called Endeavour Square (surrounded on one side by a building site and on most of the others by chain restaurants), playing classical solo viola (a Bach cello suite, some melodic items from the viola version of Mazas’ violin studies, a Hoffmeister étude, and two movements of a Reger suite, if you’re fanatically interested).

I wasn’t dependent upon tips for making money from freezing my fingers thus; in fact, I was both promised a contractual payment and forbidden to collect money, which meant I had to rebuff a few would-be donors!

However, not only was I providing background music (at least in theory) in a public outdoor space, but IQL had recruited their classical (by request) mood music players through Busk in London – who administer the National Rail station busking scheme I participate in during warmer weather and/or better health. In effect then, someone decided to hire some buskers to, arguably, not busk.

However, the semantics are of little importance to me compared to actually getting a paid gig this early in the year (and one where I could make use of the classical viola practice, and learning of non-orchestral repertoire, that all too often seems only indirectly useful). So long as the money appears in my account soon!

(PS my first wedding gig of the year is this Saturday, and there’s more of a regular stream of jobs picking up from then. Hopefully thereafter I will maunder about lack of work and/or money less!)