London Viola Player, Violinist & Arranger For Hire

Martin Ash LTCL

Go Downtown. Get Funky.

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Yesterday’s post brought me up to my last pro gig before Christmas. (I shall forebear to write at length about playing for fun at Christmas carol services at my own church (on the same day as the second Euston job, but in a pub function barn) and upcoming at my mum’s church on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning.) But by combining the two Chapel of Life events, I skipped over one more important write-up before I knock off for Christmas (coming back, of course, not quite in 2018 as I still have a new year’s gig to play). In other words: up yours chronology, go thematic organisation yeah!

first-rehearsal-montage

What was I doing in a somewhat chilly large rehearsal room near Upminster on Monday 12 December? Well, that requires a bit of backstory.

Allow me to introduce Joe Fryd. Joe is an almost insultingly good-looking working dad and ex-copper from Essex who has built up a very good business for himself over the last few years singing swing / Rat Pack / crooner / etc. material for classy end functions, essentially as a solo singer with backing tracks. And I do mean a very good business in terms of frequency of booking and actually making a decent living at it with relatively little ‘other work’ on the side.

From that position of dealing with substantial-budget corporate, wedding, agency, etc. clients, the next step Joe both wants to take artistically and thinks is a viable business plan is to do some gigs ditching the tracks and instead bringing in a full live band.

And being that sort of guy, he isn’t going to sit around waiting for that to happen, he’s going to tap musicians he knows and get them to tap other players they know and pull something together sooner rather than later, because everything comes to him who hustles while he waits (according to Edison). I don’t know how he got hold of my oft-time freelance colleague Graeme Hollingdale (someone I mostly know as a classical double bassist), but he did, and Graeme very kindly put me forward for the planned violin chair.

Enter the Downtown Funk. This was the first time of getting actual people in a room to play music and talk plans, and it wasn’t clear to me from email discussion in advance whether we really had a solid basis to make it gel or not. I had put together violin parts for a handful of vocal swing standards to give a live hint of the string sections added to big bands favoured by Bublé et al; I knew we were looking at reduced horns compared to the original (very) big band orchestrations; that was about it.

Actually I think we all walked away thinking this is a project that will go places. Partly because Joe has the energy, people skills and marketing ability to make what we wants happen commercially. But just as much because, even with keys and/or guitar chairs empty (this will be soon fixed) and playing mostly straight off stock charts that would work better with a little doctoring to the specific line-up, it worked musically. That chilly converted farm outhouse swung, with the combination of energy, freedom and precision that is the demanding tightrope of successful big band jazz (believe me, I have heard just as good arrangements be wooden and lifeless, or sloppy and slack). And I’m confident that, when we start varying the swing with soul and funk, that will be just as taut. What we really need is audiences to reflect some of that energy back.

So I’m moderately confident that, barring unforeseeable accidents and acts of God, 2017 should see me playing some events that I almost certainly could never afford to get into, for fees and with a class of ensemble that will make a significant difference to my musical working life.

But, before I get carried away with hypotheticals, I do have one gig left before the Great Working Musicians’ Desert of January (seriously, this is when all the musos tighten their belts, because the punters have massive credit card debt / accumulated hangovers / new year’s resolutions to go to the gym instead of licensed venues):
Kindred Spirit Duo play 2016 out and 2017 in at the Fish in Sutton Courtenay, with a full 2 hours of live music alongside Michelin guide listed cuisine and appropriately late opening. See you there for the last gig of the year, and the first of the next!

Let’s go to meeting

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The last two Sundays, I was at Friends’ Meeting House over the road from Euston station in central London. Working as a hired musician, not for the Quakers (Friends), but for another church who had hired space there as well as a bunch of session pros. I would describe them as a Nigerian independent evangelical charismatic church, but it might convey more to readers with roots in the music business and not the Christian church to call it a somewhat modernised gospel church.

The brief and situation for the afternoon of Sunday 11th was fairly straightforward: a more or less concert setting, albeit with interspersed live and video presentation connected with the Christmas story. Musical direction, rhythm section and core singers (soloists and parts of gospel choir) from the church’s own people, boosted by hired hands bulking out the choral parts and supplying seven-piece strings and the same number of horns (in the jazz / soul sense: flute, two saxes, trumpet, French horn, trombone, tuba the one ‘house’ interloper in the ‘orchestral’ sections). Played and sung more or less by the charts, with tweaks here and there but little that would surprise any one with any big band or pit experience.

I should say that there was never any expectation of, let alone condition upon, the session musicians being spiritually aligned with the clients (so long as, obviously, we raised no objections or conflict!). In fact I think that side of the situation (a potential minefield!) was admirably sensitively handled by all concerned.

That didn’t prevent a fair amount of cultural and musical adjustment being required on many sides over the course of the engagement! I’ve stated often enough that the jobbing pro musician’ experience is generally of spending about as much time performing as rehearsing, if not slightly more. For a concert of perhaps 90 minutes’ music, the majority of the orchestral players had 13 hours of rehearsal scheduled. Admittedly, that included pizza breaks (pizza and sides provided!), but I still have to admit I struggled to adapt to stated start times not even seeing everyone needed in the room, and to a generally much more relaxed rate of progress than the slightly frenzied focus of a paid classical rehearsal with 5 hours from first downbeat to doors opening to the public.

Lest it be thought this was a one-way street, the gentleman (in the best sense of the word) doing the sizeable job of integrating the whole musical picture had to put up with being asked (a couple of times) for a clearer downbeat and indeed a more precise beat generally than his home territory of shaping a gospel choir and band called  for during one complexly scored coda with no rhythm section. Nonetheless a few rocky moments in the performance stemmed from songs starting very sharp from a previous item, the rhythm section not quite picking up the first bar and the house musicians being more comfortable picking up how long the intro would now become than the session players, rather more tied to the structure of their written parts.

But nonetheless it was a good atmosphere and, as I say, a fairly familiar broadly performance-type environment. And the crowd were certainly having a great time, especially in the bookending ensemble set pieces: a chunk of through-composed gospel lifting some musical motifs from ‘Angels from the Realms of Glory’ and taking its lyrical cue from the angels’ song in Luke’s nativity story, and a pretty direct cover of Quincy Jones’s reworking of the Hallelujah Chorus. (Seriously, watch it now. You won’t regret it.)

Yesterday posed somewhat different challenges. A carol service it may have been (well, there were some carols; and some gospel-Christian rock-worship songs; and one of last Sunday’s big numbers), but most importantly this was definitely a church service, and the elements of charismatic Christianity that had perhaps been more reference points the week before were now of course the core of the event.

The hired musicians were just a quartet of strings this time. And the charts we had were clearly central to the traditional carols; not so much to the other songs, where the order of sections followed by the lead singers bore I suspect only a coincidental resemblance to the one in the PDFs emailed 24 hours before! (No rehearsal at all for the service by the way.) Structure of the service was also decidedly fluid and heavily dependent on the time taken by the guest preacher for his sermon and the direction by his moving from speech to song to call to what I would describe as congregational ritual action – evidently unforewarned but followed fluidly by rhythm section (especially keys players supplying improvised ‘mood music’ a lot of the way) and congregation. I would probably have found this a lot more interesting, and less tense, had I not been under a microphone that might or might not have been muted when I wasn’t playing and on a stage right behind the lectern in the congregation’s eyeline. Expectations or not, I felt decidedly visible sitting out most of the congregation participation!

I need to repeat that in many ways these were a fun pair of gigs (because both were ultimately bill-paying gigs for me; one of the strangest things about them), and that the appreciation of what we were doing was truly touching and the welcome faultlessly warm. Nonetheless, for all my roots in (certain particular parts of) the Christian Church, it felt like an excursion to a foreign culture, with all the internal tensions that are apt to be part and parcel of cultural exchange for the conscientious left-leaning liberal Westerner. Which said, would I play the gig again? Absolutely – even if all the more so for being the better prepared for the local norms by doing it once …

Double whammy

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Last week saw me rehearse in London Tuesday to Friday evenings, the last two required to be on site for 5 hours straight, while (thanks to running out of holiday) also doing 4 hours a day at a desk (plus lunch break) in Oxford Monday through to Friday. I’m still feeling the effects now, though there wasn’t exactly a let-up come the weekend.

However, only exceptional rehearsals get blog posts, especially when I’m this tired. So performance wise I’ve come to last Saturday, 10 December. When I managed to fit in two gigs, not something most professional musicians manage unless they’re playing cruise ships. Otherwise, the sets tend to be too long, the setup and packdown time similarly, and too many of the performance opportunities in the same time slots (Friday and Saturday nights, basically).

The first slot this day was a wedding, a local job in an Oxford hotel (close enough to bike to, which makes a change from incurring coach or train fares). The party had opted for chamber strings in the earlier part of the day, covering arrival of guests at the venue, guests moving into a separate room for the (civic) ceremony, the signing of the register and the drinks reception separating the ceremony from the main meal.

So far, so standard; and similarly for the fact that mostly we were left free choice over repertoire, with a few requested / suggested classical ‘lollipops’ and pop songs. (I can confirm a slightly ‘slushy’ taste on the couple’s part: Coldplay, Air on the G String, Pachelbel; they suggested but, for reasons which will become clear, we didn’t attempt the Barber Adagio and Nimrod.)

The distinctive feature being that, faced with the price of wedding musicians, this client had backed away from the usual quartet and booked just a duo of strings, myself and long-term collaborator (mostly in the String Project) Ben Mowat. Now there is a fairly substantial upper string duo repertoire, particularly from the Classical (sensu strictu) era, much of it quite easy on the players and the ear, and we filled up the non-requests part of the time with Messrs. Mozart, Mazas and others, Petrucci coming into its own for supplying parts and me swapping between violin and viola to support Ben’s violin as occasion demanded.

Classical requests were lightly rearranged or rejected depending on suitability, but the pop song side of things required a little more ingenuity. Having sight of overall harmonic structure is generally more important than a fixed set of notes for accompanying pop tunes in a hurry, except for the odd lick so characteristic that its absence from the backing would be felt. So while Ben used MIDI transcriptions and lead parts of published arrangements to get playable prompts of melodies, I would like to claim a Guinness world first of the rhythm viola part as my response to this situation:

hey jude rhythm viola.jpg

Of course I did fine with that as a ‘part’ and one run-through. I don’t know why you even need to ask. No, genuinely it was fine, and I think any problems over the day can be attributed to the ability of a large crowd of people in small, low-ceilinged rooms to make it literally difficult to hear the acoustic string player next to you clearly over your own playing – something which surprised even me!

belle vue 161210 band.jpg

I had a few hours off, amazingly, between finishing this (and getting soaked in the downpour that had emerged from drizzle since I left the house) and heading to High Wycombe for almost the last gig of the year with Kindred Spirit. This was at the Belle Vue, a nice pub-venue with an excellent draught ale policy and a generally appreciative clientele but, as you can see, ‘cozy’ in every sense of the word. Despite the difficulties of where to put an IEM pack without a coat pocket, 2 45-minute sets, a couple of encores and some broadly successful experimentation getting overdrive ‘lead guitar’ sounds out of a slightly temperamental multi-effects pedal involved shedding not just the velvet jacket but some fairly copious quantities of perspiration:

belle vue 161210 me late on.jpg

Well, I guess I needed some way of working off the pizza supplied as dinner in those 5-hour rehearsals without having time for a gym membership! The effort was well rewarded by the audience response though – and we’re already booked for a return next year.

That’s the last of the full Kindred Spirit band till February 2017, though Elaine and I are playing in the new year in the outer vicinity of Oxford – my actual last gig of the year!

That was Saturday. Read on whenever I next have time, access to a computer and energy to write to find out what I got up to on Sunday (hint: it wasn’t a lie in and a PJ day).

Not as Irish as you might think

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It has been quite some week for music-making (not least in terms of sheer hours spent on it). As always when I’m very busy playing, I’m rather behind blogging. So let me go back 10 days to Saturday 3 December, and catch up from there.

northampton.jpg

The Filthy Spectacula played out 2016 in our schedule at the Northampton branch of O’Neill’s. Yes, that O’Neill’s. The Irish pub chain. If you’re a little wrong-footed by the booking, so were we. Frontman Mr E unsurprisingly asked the manager who had booked us (while he was setting up the PA) ‘So what sort of bands do you normally have here?’ He unsurprisingly answered ‘Oh, mostly covers bands, folk-rock, that sort of thing, you know.’ It would have been logical to ask ‘So why did you book us?’ – but I’m afraid we didn’t.

The answer might be to do with educating the clientele in the mysterious subgenre of rock called ‘Other / Unclassifiable’ which lurks threateningly down the bottom of alphabetical drop-down lists. Judging by the staff’s behaviour, I think it’s more likely the answer would have been along the lines of ‘Because we can … and because if we hear Whiskey on the Jar one more time when we’re on shift, never mind Hotel California, it’s going to be their funeral and our trial.’

The bloke who asked, also while we were setting up, if we knew any Christy Moore was presumably rather disappointed. The glass of Guiness prominently visible in the photo probably constituted our biggest concession to the surroundings of the night. However, most of the crowd seemed very much the reverse of disappointed. I treasure two testimonials from this gig. One the woman of central European origin who said we were the best entertainment she’d seen in Northampton in 5 years and wanted to get us booked in a bigger venue up the other road. The other a bloke looking about as little alternative as it’s practically possible to be, who shook my hand and said he mostly listened to drum and bass but he absolutely loved what we did and the way we put on a show.

You’re never going to get a packed house of adoring fans playing essentially a function type set in a chain pub in Northampton. But I’ve played to emptier and less appreciative rooms, and we probably could have broken even on the albums, T-shirts and badges bought by the bar staff alone (one of whom was very interested in trying to buy the case our merch is sold out of too … ).

Just, for the love of God, nobody infect the Dreadful Helmsman with novovirus on the day of a gig again. Filthy Spectacula gigs with no bass are seriously tough!

Good things come in small yellow packages

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filth yellow book 161126.jpg

One commentator on the above photo says the venue looks smaller than his flat, and I can believe him (the bar does actually go back through the archway under the Pride flag, but you can’t see the band from there so it was pretty empty until you reached the smoking shelter).

Nonetheless, once we’d got through setting up and soundchecking in that little corner / staircase, this was actually a great Filthy Spectacula gig, as packed as it looks and if anything even more enthusiastic, a noisy, appreciative, lairy in the best possible sense crowd that, just like our previous gig at the Yellow Book, disproved every disobliging thing I’ve ever said about steampunk crowds just wanting to sit down and drink tea.

Not that it was all steampunks – special mentions have to go to Gabriel, who I met on a train weeks ago coming home from a practice with his reggae band, plugged the gig to with no real expectation of him coming and he was there with three mates! and Mel and her bloke who came over from Dorset to Brighton just to see us. All of them had a great time, so it just goes to show it’s worth following up every chance!

And on the viable principle of going to play where you have fans, we need to sort out gigs in Dorset and Tonbridge Wells (that’s another story involving Weekend at the Asylum and The Men who Will Not be Blamed for Nothing … ). We’ll work on it – especially if you pester your venues to book us, then give us their email address so we can ‘conveniently’ get in touch to ask for a booking at the same time!

Meanwhile in the social media sphere, discussing airplay courtesy of GASP on Midlands Metalheads: ‘Anyone else got the urge to dress like a pirate yet still dance like Madness?’ ‘That’s the Filthy Spectacula effect!’ I promise we did not rig either of those comments, seriously. Some things are too perfect to make up.

Saturday coming sees the last Filthy gig of the year, playing at the Northampton branch of O’Neill’s, who must be taking at least as much of a gamble on us as we are on them. All I can say is, if you’re offended by swearing or songs about violence / prostitution / alcoholism, what are you doing in an O’Neill’s on a Saturday night?

Not my last gig of the year though, as the remaining weeks of December pack in a wedding job, a Kindred Spirit full band gig, and a Christmas musical and carol service for an evangelical charismatic church in Euston before Elaine and I play the old year out and the new one in as the Kindred Spirit duo. Watch this space for further details!

All ways autumnal

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‘Autumn Leaves’ is a lovely jazz standard, isn’t it? Though I was surprised, working on this version, to find out how unrelated Johnny Mercer’s English lyric is to the French original (in which the title, ‘Les Feuilles Mortes’, which I had always assumed to go to the first phrase of the chorus, must actually fall in the verse I’ve never played).

I’ve written at some length about my part of the recording process on this track, and won’t repeat it (not least because I need to type this quickly and head off in the direction of a Filthy Spectacula gig, oddly enough in Brighton like the recording of this track). To round that story off, the backing was edited together into a single track after I left, then the vocals recorded over the top (presumably! the order may have been different), then the whole thing sent online to a producer who had not been present at any of the recording for mixing and mastering. Then (still within the period October – November, Annie could hardly have picked a more seasonal track) the audio came back and had a simple but effective video filmed to it.

Here’s the finished result – enjoy before we’re fully into winter!

https://youtu.be/ENfJrOyDkHo

Ebbs and flows

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There’s nothing like a slightly empty-looking patch of diary to prompt the self-employed to renewed marketing activity …

The Filthy Spectacula are going through a purple patch at present. Last Saturday, we made a rapturously-received return to Midsomer Norton:

filth midsomer norton.jpg

This Saturday, we’re back at one of our favourite venues, the Yellow Book in Brighton. Last (first) time was a wild and exhilarating night, so if you’re on the area get on down, it can only get better the more people we know down there (I’ve done a few south coast gigs with this band and others since, so it should be a corker!). And the week after, 3 December, we break fresh ground in the brave new world of … Northampton. Can’t say I know much about Northampton. Is it where Kinky Boots is set? That would be great.

Behind the scenes, however, we are also squirrelling away getting Filthy nights of debauchery (well, I can hope … long coach journeys, Subway for dinner and expensive beer more like) lined up for you in 2017 (though, as you can see, we’ve got some in already). If you’ve got that hot tip for the venue or event that needs our sounds enough to make us rich (or, again, realistically just capable of paying the rent) buying them from us, then get in touch. No, really! We only bite if you suggest signing up to a wedding music agency or paying to play in a ‘showcase’.

Meanwhile, in my other office, the Kindred Spirit band (full five-piece prog-folk monster version) diary is looking quite well populated for next year. We’d like to keep it that way though, so send suggestions for that band our way too – we’re sort of less black, more green, less swearing, more invoking the spirits of the trees. You know the deal by now.

Elaine and I are finding the west London pub circuit slightly tight around the middle, however (too many breweries and landlords tightening their belts, alas). So we are taking our patented genre-spanning covers-focused combination of crystal-clear vocals, textured guitar and barnstorming fiddle from its bar gig roots to the function world, where I think it already belongs. Please take a look at our new online face (and leave us a review if you’ve seen us and are feeling kind!), and you absolutely must watch our new video showreel, showing highlights of the repertoire, performance and ensemble we’ve achieved up to now:

Onwards and upwards! December and New Year are already really busy for me (some more bookings I haven’t even had time to list on here), I’ll catch up with you all in January if not before …

Reviewed

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Great review of the Filthy Spectacula‘s Thrup’ny Upright just out in Steampunk Journal. The album’s described as ‘a rowdy, raucous affair and a thoroughly enjoyable album to listen to’, ‘well produced with a fine balance of instruments’ and ‘intelligent’ lyrics. There’s even a special mention for my string arrangements, and overall it gets a hearty 8 out of 10. Have a read!

The Steampunk Journal reviewer signs off ‘If you like lively music to dance and drink to, Thrup’ny Upright will be right up your street’ – but I think all those in the know would agree the band live are much better again for that purpose. So come and see us before 2016 shuffles off this mortal coil, bearing its heavy load of celebrity deaths and political miscarriages:
The Greyhound, Midsomer Norton, 19 Nov
The Yellow Book, Brighton, 26 Nov
O’Neill’s, Northampton, 3 Dec
all gig details at http://thefilthyspectacula.com/shows

Building up a reputation

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Last night (Tuesday), I shared a stage with Star Wars referencing dance troupe Boogie Storm, comedian Jo Caulfield and the winners of the construction industry’s annual awards bash. Wondering what I was doing there yet? Yeah, me too some of the time …

building-awards-overview

To be strictly accurate, I was never on the stage in the Great Room of Park Lane’s (to my plebeian eyes) insanely plush Grosvenor House Hotel. But the above-mentioned and others did share the attention of round about 1200 construction industry movers and shakers (maybe that’s a badly chosen phrase, thinking about it).

I was depping in the first violins with the Collaborative Orchestra, who were supplying a carefully unforeshadowed flashmob-style performance between dessert and the actual awards presentation. If you saw their first Britain’s Got Talent appearance (I’ve watched the YouTube version – professional research … ) then you have a reasonable impression of what was involved.

It’s tempting to say the most difficult thing involved was getting eight violin cases concealed under a dining table, then being able to whip them all out again set up to play in a few bars of introduction. Either that or, in my case, trying to deliver the essence of the Martin Ash rock violin stage manner in a very crowded dining room without shoving my bow in some unfortunate guest’s eye (slightly to my regret, I was told not to stand on my chair, perhaps because that stunt could hardly be matched by my female colleagues in heels and cocktail dresses) – the brief was to blend into a backing track and to look like we were having fun as much as worry about projecting sound, so I used my usual toolkit! (not a very classical/  orchestral one it would have to be said – in the course of two rehearsals and performance I managed to become known to the orchestra as ‘the dancing violin dep’ … )

I haven’t done a gig with such a high ratio of rehearsal time to performance, let alone waiting around to playing of any kind, in a long time. However, the audience response and the pay scale were more in line with the total work put in than the under four minutes of the performance; and getting to slot in as a guest to a black-tie dinner costing (apparently) some £300 a head to regular attendees isn’t a bad perk … What better was I going to do with my Tuesday night?

Rather more familiar territory, material and company this Friday, as the Kindred Spirit duo show up back at the Hope in Richmond. Much more music too, and I assure you it will all be raw live (albeit amplified and in places effects-processed). We do have company on ‘stage’ though, with eminent support from the Michele Osten Duo. And it should cost about £300 less to get in!

Motherlands and hinterlands

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On Sunday night I travelled over to the Isle of Wight to play with a more or less scratch orchestra for a Last Night of the Proms concert.

There are many things that are peculiar about these kinds of things (and some more that were curious about this one in particular). The most obvious is probably that one annual performance has spawned a subgenre that must outnumber the actual last performance of the BBC Proms by hundreds to one in terms of concerts given.

The indispensable feature, as with programming the actual Albert Hall Last Night, of course, is a (usually literally) flag-waving finale sequence including chunks of Henry Wood’s Fantasia on British Sea Songs, ‘Rule Britannia’, ‘Jerusalem’, ‘Pomp & Circumstance March No. 1’ (better known as ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ – usually only the tail end of the concert march is played as that is the bit the words were set to) and the English national anthem. As a cellist with whom (and his violinist sister, doing the actual driving) I lift-shared pointed out, cheerful popular nationalism isn’t really seen anywhere else in Britain except sport today – and sporting nationalism is very different and, to the non sports fan, quite strange in itself.

What other music goes into the mix leading up to that finale sequence is rather more at planners’ discretion. But Sunday’s event was probably fairly typical of at least the traditional form of these things. The Isle of Wight, as far as I can gather from car journeys across it to and from the gig, is a patch of gently rolling countryside encrusted with southern English seaside towns – very much as if there had been a sixth Cinque Port which got torn up from its place alongside Deal, Sandwich et al and accidentally dropped by a butter-fingered giant a few miles off Southampton. Out of tourist season, the population is rather middle-class and past middle age, and the musical community, at least the community putting on this concert, is mostly led by military and ex-military men (conductor: Major (ret’d); post horn soloists (we’ll get to that): one current and one former Marine; concert organised by a bloke from the Drum Corps).

So we had a musical programme tailored towards what the likely audience would be likely to enjoy (which, let’s be honest, is more than can be said for a lot of orchestral performances). Most concisely, you could call this the hinterlands of classical music without being really of it. More flag-waving (Dambusters March); some pretty interludes (Nimrod from the Enigma Variations, the Intermezzo from Cavalieri Rusticana); plenty of numbers with soloists, mostly singers, to give focus (a Puccini aria, a Lehar lied); bits of fun people are likely to know (Radetsky March, ‘Orpheus in the Underworld’ which for most modern purposes is the can-can with a long introduction). Soloists local of course, the singers either gifted teenagers or temporary returnees from London conservatoires. You could see the whole thing as falling into the now more or less dead genre of ‘light music’; even the more modern insertions (medleys of excerpts from Oliver, Les Misérables and the score to Pirates of the Caribbean) fit the spirit and approach of the style with only a chronological update from, say, Sullivan’s ‘Pineapple Polka’.

Perhaps you could sum up by saying that this is defined by being orchestral music – it all truly was, no fudging the issue by draping string and wind sections around essentially a rock band or piano and vocals sound – with none of the genuine classical tradition’s approach to structure. Only the medleys made it over about five minutes long (bar possibly ‘Orpheus’), and they did so by joining thematically unrelated material end to end. It requires classical discipline to play (I was put on violin 1 and had some startlingly high and fast notes to get round – too much of my recent and/or paid orchestral playing has been on viola from that point of view), but not classical understanding to listen to with appreciation. Its roots are in non-orchestral secular music (being essentially only folk in Western Europe until the end of the nineteenth century) not being respectable, but it being genuinely unreasonable to expect an audience defined by social class rather than aesthetic preferences to enjoy programmes of symphonies and concerti (in the form to which they developed after Beethoven anyway – the shape of the sociomusical scene up to about the 1770s was markedly different).

Approaches to the music become different as it is valued less. Different pencil scrawls indicate a cut here, a tacet there, this section down the octave, an extra repeat or encore of this section in a way that would never be dreamed of in high art music (though that pales into insignificance compared to actual pit band parts for musicals and theatre). The language was revealing of less exaggerated self-respect than the typical orchestral professional too: a note on the final phrase of the Pirates of the Caribbean medley (played by us, too, with each note directed) read: ‘just follow the f[***]ing conductor!’. Expectations of conductors are seemingly different too. Whereas conducting from full score became de rigueur for classical music as far back as the nineteenth century I believe, several of these editions (not always the most musically straightforward either), printed certainly after WW1 and possibly after WW2, had instead the ‘Violin 1 (Conductor)’ part, a curious halfway house in which the tune is cued into the first violin part wherever it isn’t being played by them anyway, or sometimes only where they would otherwise have long rests. The result of course is that the conductor is more or less limited to giving the pulse, cueing lead entries and correcting any mistakes in the melody (never mind the assumption that there is only one melody at a time). There is a built-in assumption of little rehearsal time and little subtlety here, which is once again telling for the attention the composer / arranger expected the audience to give: one tune, always on top of some accompanying parts, style of delivery doesn’t have to vary too much, you’ll know if a note’s wrong because it will sound wrong, go!

As I say, this programme was well-judged for its context and billing. It certainly seemed so by audience reaction, and a fairly full audience. Even the deliberately bad, groan-inducing, very extended comic compèring à la Dame Edna Everage, which at times made me wonder if she was introducing the orchestra or we were providing the musical interludes in her stand-up act, seemed to go down well. Not that the orchestra were taking things lying down on the comic front, with a cadenza to the Post-Horn Galop that lasted rather longer than the piece itself (impressive that anyone can do circular breathing on a natural brass instrument, especially while wandering through the auditorium), the semi-traditional suddenly out of tune ending to the violin solo in the Fantasia on Sea Songs and a drastic accelerando as ‘Auld Lang Syne’ proceeded which I can testify was not marked in any of the parts!

Nonetheless, I return to my opening remark: this style, orchestral and mostly nineteenth-century music as accessible entertainment, is an oddity for my generation, even to someone like me who does music as accessible entertainment much more often than music as art. Maybe the fact I do that is the reason why I would quite like my fully-scored, especially orchestral, playing to contain a little more meaty content when I get to do any?