London Viola Player, Violinist & Arranger For Hire

Martin Ash LTCL

Monthly Archives: September 2020

The group that came in from the cold

At the moment in the UK, any opportunity to play live music for a live audience is, in the collective scheme of things, special; to do so for pay, doubly so*.

However, Wednesday night’s Flux Ensemble concert was nonetheless individually special, and might even have been so without a pandemic and lockdown.

For one thing, it was my first indoor performance in over six months, since St Patrick’s Day (er, weekend) celebrations in mid-March just pre-lockdown. As if to mark the point, it was an autumnal, intermittently rainy September day in London after most of the month feeling like high summer!

For another, we were in the stunning (and grandiose) surroundings of Southwark Cathedral. And all right, we were again playing transcriptions of film scores – but there’s still a privileged feeling more like real classical musicians when you’re playing acoustically (in years of acoustic strings being easily drowned out, I have never been so glad for the client not to want to amplify me!) in a medieval building with such an awesome acoustic.

Admittedly, we did have to get used to the audience, especially the back of the audience, being a lot further away than in our outdoor gigs at Camden Market. (Socially distanced audience means they cover a lot of square feet of floor space by the time you have enough in to make the event profitable!) And the size and acoustic perversely meant we had to get used to not being able to hear each other as clearly. On the other hand, there is something egotistically satisfying about the knowledge (checked by ‘sound check’ before we let the audience in!) that I can talk to, or at least address, an audience to be heard the length of a nave this size:

So I hope we get the chance – through our current run of Fever gigs or otherwise – to come back here. And maybe even to do a few indoor gigs somewhere else! The season for bandstands and deckchairs is definitely tailing out …

*Though there are actually fewer hoops to jump through for professionals than amateurs. I don’t want to sound harsh, but it makes a change from the years of people managing to make it sound like ‘giving musicians an opportunity to perform’ without rewarding them for their work was philanthropic.

Getting burnt by love in a field in lockdown

All right, I admit it, the post title may have seen me get carried away by my taste for puns and verbal misdirection …

Relocation in progress. Photo by Sabina Virtosu

I spent most of Sunday 12 July in a field in Essex, playing music back when we weren’t allowed audiences at all. I was playing viola in, and attempting to help coordinate, a small orchestra forming the third side of a triangular video shoot / live session, along with singer-songwriter WILDES and Hackney Colliery Band. (I had also previously remote recorded the violin and viola parts for the mix being used as a guide track and to stiffen the live audio – something I’m still very much available to do more of, as well as location recordings and indeed video shoots!)

Spot the ‘solving a musical problem’ face … I think this is when one of the trumpeters found a wrong note in his part and it fell to me to work out one that would be in the chord. Photo by Sabina Virtosu

It was a total privilege to be able to work (and hang out a bit) with such high-level musicians. The track for the session was a new orchestral version of WILDES’ ‘True Love’ (are you following the post title connections here?), and I’m delighted to say that track and video are out now, and even if you can’t aurally separate my playing from the rest of the string section I’m definitely visible:

And the getting burnt? That was literal (well, sunburnt – not chemically oxidised!). I hadn’t been outside for anywhere near that long since last summer, didn’t so much as own any sun cream, and by the time we wrapped my arms and face pretty much matched my shirt …

First fruits

Think back to the start of June this year.

The very beginnings of easing were coming to lockdown. A few musicians were cautiously glad it was legal – with other conditions in place – to go and do recordings if they were solo tracking, with no other musicians playing and the engineer in a separate control room. Face coverings hadn’t even been made mandatory on public transport yet (though the takeup by Londoners hardly seems to have increased when it did become the law), let alone in shops.

Multimedia artist Zahed Sultan and I consulted and examined the then-current guidance in some detail. I ventured beyond cycling distance of my house for the first time since before the start of lockdown, and travelled to his home studio across London (scarf tied across my face as I would only invest in some bespoke masks a little while later). There, we spent most of a day layering violin and viola drones, trills and answering phrases for two tracks he was working on, with a lot of ideas being tried out for the next take and recording everything to pick out what worked later. It was intense and exhausting (and the combination of sound insulation and infection prevention meant I was in an airless sauna of a room), but creative, fulfilling and unique. My first paid work in nearly 3 months; my first work outside the house in the same amount of time. It was to be another substantial wait for the next working journey!

It was striking news at the time! And seemingly excitement and/or pandemic stress were giving me camera-shake …

The first of those tracks is now out!

I’ve never heard anything quite like ‘Layl’. It shows absorbing electronic and urban influences doesn’t have to mean accepting predictable lowest-common-denominator-Western rhythmic patterns; dynamism and range over a track doesn’t have to mean moving harmony; and there are many ways to square the Arabic-Western musical fusion circle. Take a listen for the string parts that stayed off the cutting room floor! and watch this space for the other track I worked on with Zahed. Thankfully studio recording is no longer quite so epoch-making; but I’m looking forward to equally productive future sessions in this collaboration.

For one night only …

… I’m returning to live streaming. Not off my own bat, simulcast and genre-spanning this time, but a fairly straightforward ‘classical’ solo viola recital for Facebook project Front Room Concerts:

Though I’m still managing to break with usual art music convention to the extent of including some of my own compositions! To unpack that slightly cryptic repertoire list, I’m planning to play:

  • The first and last movements of Reger’s first suite for solo viola (in G minor)
  • The three I’ve so far written of my open-ended series of ‘preludes’ for solo viola
  • Four of Hoffmeister’s set of viola ‘études’

These are usually well-attended virtual events with a lively chat-box conversation. Donations will be split between myself and the charity Help Musicians UK, who have supported many of my friends who found themselves in dire financial circumstances as soon as we were locked down, so please tune in, comment, give and make me feel good about going back to playing to a webcam and a pair of mikes for this once!

In Flux

I’ve been involved in two projects (one my own, one not) to form function/wedding string ensembles that didn’t get off the ground. Ironic, then, that I realised in the course of August I had effectively come to be running one without having planned it as such.

What do you do if you find you have a band? Give it a brand, of course. So please say hello to Flux Ensemble, of which you will be hearing much more in future. While the name is new, I think it’s accurate as well as commercially convenient to consider the same group as having already performed in a variety of contexts, including December’s ‘Christmas Classics’ concert, last month’s garden party string duo, and the string quartet concert of film music last Saturday at which we used the name for the first time.

We have more gigs coming up, even as most musicians are only barely starting to find work again: Fever London have a string quartet lineup booked for two more evenings of film music outside in Camden Stables Market, and for Chopin on a Thames cruise later in September.

But that doesn’t mean we aren’t available for more work! Any and all projects considered, so if you have an event that needs music, or an idea in mind to explore, email [email protected] or contact me by any other means! And watch this space for more gig announcements …

Doomsday(s)

Oddly enough, my last ‘lockdown project’ before HGO’s Sāvitri was also an opera of chamber-ish musical dimensions (though rather greater duration, and brand new): (composer) John Sturt’s and (librettist) Sophia Chapadjiev’s Minutes to Midnight.

Drawing partly on the Doomsday Clock concept (which has inspired a string of artistic reactions; see for instance the BBC mini-series Summer of Rockets), Minutes to Midnight is set in a US military nuclear control bunker during vote-counting in the 2016 presidential election. This interview with the composer and librettist talks through some of its genesis. The juxtaposition with my black-comic habit of referring to the Covid-19 pandemic as things along the lines of ‘the end of the world as we knew it’ is … ironic.

I got involved at the point when composition was concluded and my good friend and frequent musical colleague Flick Cliffe had been brought on board as conductor and musical director. At that point in midsummer it was very uncertain whether any kind of live performance would be possible, even with the work’s having been adopted by Tête à Tête Opera Festival, and the approach being taken exemplified the difficulties and uncertainties of music-making as lockdown started to lift.

The first stage was to create a recording – without being able to bring about 20 performers (counting both chamber orchestra and cast) together in a studio. John laboriously created click tracks, with guide recitative sections, for the whole opera. Flick added conducting videos to these, which were sent out together with the parts to the instrumentalists, including myself (on viola as for most classical projects).

Suffice to say that for a string player, being asked to record to releasable quality with only clicks and conducting for guidance reveals how much one generally relies on harmonic context for intonation! John’s writing is chiefly concordant though not necessarily tonal in any strict sense, but it was a challenge (which required quite some work and concentration, and a couple of shortcuts, to overcome) to pitch a generally inner harmony part of it against my linear playing / the strings of the instrument without another pitched part to blend with. I’m going to hope it was good discipline and/or training for something, or for playing in general!

Those instrumental recordings will have the vocal parts dubbed over them for an audio release. However, they will also be used with live cast (Flick has the unenviable task of mediating between pre-recorded accompaniment and live singing) for both a broadcast and an actual live performance (with distanced audience of course) of selections from the opera later this month. I highly encourage you to consider attending either – not just because I only get paid if some money is made from ticket sales, but because it is a fascinating work (judging by what I have heard of it, chiefly the recitatives!) and the additional broadcast material around both nuclear weapons and pandemic collaboration seem in their own way top-class.

However, I can’t say I’m entirely sorry to have been able to move largely to the rather more direct experience of fully live performance for a live audience only … watch this space for more on my activities on that front …