London Viola Player, Violinist & Arranger For Hire

Martin Ash LTCL

Practising not having practised, free music downloads, and Petrucci

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Recently I’ve been responding to some friendly advice to practise my viola sight-reading. Sight-reading, like improvisation, is one of those skills that might seem inherently opposed to practice, but actually probably requires more of it than the mainstream technical concerns of classical study. In any case, it is evidently a central skill for jobbing and dep musicians whose performance: rehearsal ratios are extremely high (sometimes effectively infinite when reading the gig unrehearsed, as often in function quartet work).

Sustained sight-reading practice used to be rather difficult, for the obvious reason that you need lots of music you haven’t played before in order to genuinely be sight-reading. Buying vast reams of published music, most of which you will never polish up to performance standard, would be prohibitively expensive, especially on a music income. I was lucky to grow up in a house with lots of sheet music sitting around in various states of neglect which could be used for the purpose, or indeed on the fairly rare occasion my schoolboy self needed it to hunt for new repertoire to learn properly. Obviously this changed when I moved out.

My new, relatively technologically advanced and eco-friendly solution to the problem is IMSLP’s Petrucci site, which I cannot recommend highly enough. It is essentially a repository of PDF scans (occasionally exported typesettings without the print & scan stages) of public-domain, almost always classical, music. This mostly consists of works and editions on which the copyright has expired, with the odd newish work, or new typesetting or out-of-copyright work, on which the copyright has been consciously waived. It currently contains just shy of 100,000 different compositions, from the essential to the extremely obscure. The search and filter systems are a little labyrinthine, but once you’ve discovered how to do it once it isn’t difficult to simply pull up, say, all the works for viola and piano, and start opening up viola parts to read, repeatedly flexing all those mental and literal muscles of translating dots beside (mostly) alto clef into notes coming out of the instrument.

It isn’t quite ideal, not least because my laptop screen is nowhere near deep enough to display the whole length of a page of music at a size which is legible and so I have to make rather frequent stops for additional page turns. But I suspect the real objections of most musicians would be on a rather different level.

‘Free music? All right it may be sheet music not recordings or live performance, but show a little solidarity! How can composers, arrangers, editors, publishers make a living if you just go and download tons of sheet music for free? And why should they support your desire as a performer (and occasional arranger) to be paid if you don’t support theirs? Buy the stuff, curse you!’

Well, maybe. But there is a difference. First and foremost, there’s no breach of the law here. I’m not stealing anything or infringing anyone’s rights upon this music, and in fact no one possesses the right to stop me downloading, scanning, photocopying, copying out etc. any of it since it is public domain. I’m not using it for public performance, recording, or any directly money-making activity either. Nor am I simply taking advantage of legal loopholes: copyright can be renewed, so it can be presumed that the holders did not renew their copyright upon these items, presumably not feeling a need for it. So I’m not stealing anything, because there isn’t actually anyone losing. It’s rather like making compilations of old recordings which have passed into the public domain – the artists’ estates would no longer be entitled to royalties anyway, so it’s hard to blame record labels for repackaging them and selling them cheap as best-ofs. (This happens after 50 years in the US, a process which is usually observable in what’s left of the compilation release industry. They’re currently up to the early 60s.)

And the fact of the matter is, a lot of the obscure late-Romantic sentimentality and postmodernist peculiarity I’m encountering in my sight-reading practice would be unlikely to draw me to actually buy it anyway. Borrow library copies maybe. But as far as I’m aware library loans don’t return royalties to copyright holders since the copies are bought outright. I’ll reserve my moral scruples for parts used in public and/or commercial performance or recording at the least, and so far my conscience is clear. And my sight-reading’s improving.

Website update: referrals

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So, I’ve decided (on advice from fellow musicians) to add a page to my site for recommendations from previous clients and colleagues. Here it is. I’m going to be looking to continuously expand it, so if I’ve worked with or for you and it went well, please get in touch!

How do I request a chance?

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So someone, according to the WordPress analytics page, managed to find their way to my website googling ‘dep fiddle player’. Which I ought to be gratified by as an example of successful SEO on my part. Except that since no one has got in touch looking to hire me for dep work, they evidently weren’t very impressed by what they found when they did get here.

Now here’s the thing. When I’ve been outright hired, I don’t think I’ve had a genuinely dissatisfied client (though, given the English tendency to speak out about positives and stay silent on negatives, it’s hard to be utterly sure), and many have talked the talk well on wanting to hire me back. Admittedly, corresponding action on actually getting return bookings is a lot rarer.

Yet, my failed auditions, rejected applications and unacknowledged expressions of interest are legion. Often on jobs of a very similar level, location etc. to ones which I’ve pulled off apparently successfully.

So the question becomes: how do I convince people before actually gigging for them (since I seem to reliably underdeliver in auditions) that I’M GOOD! and YOU WILL NOT REGRET HIRING ME!

Not that I would make the statements in so many words and expect to be believed, but it is essentially what the game comes down to. And I just don’t seem to have the persuasive tools at my disposal to make it happen.

Give ’em what they want?

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One of the problems of being freelance in a crowded market is working out what the buyers are actually after. They don’t have to hunt too hard (usually) to find someone that fits their bill, so there’s no real incentive for them to be micro-specific about their requirements – they can just post up a rough ad, wait for applications to flood in, and pick someone that looks like what they want. No one’s going to bother sending detailed explanations of why they rejected you; it’s considered a sign of better than usual breeding if they bother to actually send a rejection rather than just an empty silence. Certainly very few clients are going to come to a musician going ‘I have this job. What I really need is this. Can you do it? If not can you recommend someone?’ Either they will be certain you are suitable (almost certainly meaning you’ve worked for them before), or they just won’t bother and will advertise. There is, again, no motive to try and shoehorn someone available into a role that might not quite be them when you can easily find someone else who is suited by dangling about £100 in front of Facebook.

Then again, of course, because everyone near starting out is desperate for work, they all (including me) make serious efforts to claim to be specialists in everything. Summary of every freelance player’s application for every role ever: I AM THE GOD OF MUSIC. ‘I don’t have a very professional attitude’ said no one, ever. ‘Still building up experience’ ditto. ‘Just finished university and still got some growing up to do’ ‘Not my main genre but I’m sure I can wing it’ ‘To be honest I really don’t enjoy playing musicals, but I’ll do it for the money’ etc., etc., etc. Conversely ‘I’m not female but I can wear a dress?’ written so often I suspect it’s not always a joke. Germany’s Eurovision winner notwithstanding, I’ve always felt my facial hair precludes me from pushing it that far.

So what’s to do when prioritising promotion? What, for instance, do I headline on my website? (probably not ‘passionate blues violinist’ or ‘lover of obscure Classical viola pieces and everything by Carl Stamitz’) What, indeed, do I showcase in the theoretically upcoming (don’t hold your breath) video showreel? It all seems like shots in the dark, except that distributing my shots all around the compass runs a genuine risk of spreading myself too thin (I love a good mixed metaphor) and impressing nobody.

Sometimes playing music seems like the least part of it!

Home straight but less than rapid

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So, to recap: Saturday evening, function string quartet gig in Wiltshire, on the edge of Salisbury Plain. Fairly well served by public transport, so rather than send a colleague out of their way to drop me somewhere, independent travel back. Bus to Andover, train to Basingstoke and another to Reading – all immaculately on schedule and trouble-free, even if I am a bit cold and very tired by this point.

Reading is about 25 minutes’ train ride from Oxford along the main line out of London. I arrive at midnight, to find without any prior warning that the train to Oxford I should be getting has been cancelled, and the only remaining departure to Oxford is ‘Bus’ at 00:36. There are no station staff still on duty to give any more detail or explanation, and so I settle in under a lamppost out the front of the station with my journey book to wait for half an hour.

A chance sanity check with a taxi driver redirecting departing passengers to a different taxi rank reveals rail replacement buses leave from the other side of the station – with 2 minutes to go. Bit of a jog with viola in hand gets me there before it leaves – but not before the rather small coach hired by the train company is full. That leaves a dozen of us still hanging around.

I’ve been in a comparable situation before and so I’m not too worried about getting home or spending horrific amounts of money – if it’s the train companies’ fault the ticket has not been honoured through to destination, then they are legally obliged to get the passenger there by some means.

So the count-up of numbers to destinations was fairly expected. However, unlike last time when we were put in black cabs from King’s Cross (yes, including me and one other to Oxford!), this time there is a priority contract with a phone taxi company. Evidently First Great Western have to send a lot of stranded passengers on from Reading.

Unfortunately the car park reveals another group about the same size of passengers from other cancelled trains engaged in the same activity. And the following period of waiting and confusion reveals that neither the station staff nor the taxi company have succeeded in properly coordinating and disentangling the needs of the entire body of stranded travellers. As a result, priority contract notwithstanding it takes over half an hour to get us actually into a cab.

The style of driving over the relatively short journey to Oxford train station would probably be best described as safe but not always legal. It is after all about half one in the morning by this point. By the time I’ve reached home, I’m almost exactly an hour later than the timetable said I would have been – not necessarily enough of a delay to justify massive annoyance, but of rather more consequence when it means I get to bed after a long (and, remember, working) day at past 2 a.m. rather than a little after 1.

Surprisingly many freelance musicians drive. Many need to carry substantial amounts of kit around; wedding / function gigs are often in the middle of nowhere; timings can be highly antisocial. It’s a sign of the individualism that has (regrettably, I believe) pervaded the industry that car-sharing is exceedingly rare and usually only considered if there are no other viable options.

Even if I could be bothered to do one of those intensive driving courses, get my licence before my provisional finally expires, and either hire cars when necessary or keep a vehicle of my own in the deliberately very car-unfriendly city of Oxford, I can’t afford to run a car, maintain insurance, etc. Absolutely impossible at my current income level. Public transport has to be my reliance.

Which makes it a right pain when not only does the system break down, but it does so spectacularly, failing to provide information, explanation or adequate contingency. Unfortunately, it does something close to this rather regularly; and the disincentive of paying all those taxi fares does not seem to be an adequate motivation of our privatised rail operating companies to up their game. (The failures of market competition in British railways at present would need at least another post, and one which I probably won’t write given how far away from music it would have taken me.)

I’ll never make a soldier

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One of the very few employers in the UK that will still take on musicians (as musicians) as full-time employees in a mode fairly recognisable to more conventional sectors (despite the live-in, uniformed, Official Secrets aspects), is the military. I’ve written before about how even the coveted permanent symphony orchestra posts generally leave their holders seeking out some freelance or teaching work to top up their income; and while cruise line or overseas hotel residency work is very much full-time, it is usually in fixed-term contracts no more than a few months long, no guarantee of renewal of further work. I’ve also written before about how I spent literally months teasing with the idea of applying to join the Forces string orchestra, before eventually deciding I couldn’t face standard initial military training or life as a soldier, even if it meant I was able to play music for a living.

Last night I did a gig for the Forces – viola in a string quartet, background music for an officers’ ball (so-called) during arrival / champagne and another set during dinner. At one part of a large barracks and complex on the edge of the sizeable military-controlled zone that is Salisbury Plain.

I hated it. There were probably contributing factors that weren’t to do with the locale, employer and atmosphere, but I certainly didn’t like those either.

I went to an all boys (state, academically selective, just to keep things complicated) secondary school, and was picked on almost throughout my time in school, though rarely in a directly physical way. The whole time I was on site, I think the male-dominated, loud, laddish, overconfident, very physical atmosphere reminded me of the (quite literally) rugby-playing end of my school – except that being army officers, everyone was twice the size. I’m 5’9″ (or 10 depending how straight I’m standing), slight and a bit self-conscious about it (probably really because I’ve never been strong or well-coordinated or enjoyed physical exertion in itself). A part of my brain was preparing to get mocked if not downright beaten up all evening, and wanting not to be noticed.

But you can’t just not be noticed in an army camp of course. You have to sign in, be checked off a list, receive a visitor’s badge, be escorted to the relevant bit of the site (fortunately this took the practical form of a lift there with my ‘escort’!), report to Capt Such-and-such and generally follow the rules. And of course the gate to the site has two guards – perfectly reasonable, unthreatening, relaxed and indeed helpful blokes, but carrying 3-foot long black guns of some kind. With the paint worn off in places; clearly used (even if not for actually shooting anyone), not symbolic.

Again perhaps to do with my schooldays, or perhaps actually just the consequence rather than the cause of being a gut pacifist, my response to violence real or implied is almost always to imagine it being done to me. I had to go through central London shortly after 7/7; it was the first time I’d seen gun-carrying police in the flesh, and instead of feeling protected I was actively (illogically and against conscious thought of course) scared of being shot. So too as I walked from playing back to main gate (in the dark, on my own, carrying a rather anonymous-looking black case with my viola in it), my mind would not stop playing with the notion of encountering a suspicious and trigger-happy night guard on the way.

Of course none of my fears were realised and the only problem I actually encountered getting back was caused by train companies not the military (which can have another post to itself). But given the anxiety levels of the whole experience for me, I think I can safely say I would never have made a soldier and, for all the financial and personal insecurity of a freelance lifestyle by comparison, I’m glad I didn’t try.

The death of the rabble-rouser?

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(Just don’t bother worrying about the title if you haven’t come across the (in some circles) notorious deconstructivist essay The Death of the Author, I’m not doing anything clever enough to make it worthwhile)

I’m used to thinking of my two bands as a dichotomy (doubtless oversimplistic, like all dichotomoies). The Filthy Spectacula, however convoluted some of their chord progressions and however many keys and time signatures may be involved in one song, are essentially a loud rock band with no massive pretensions to subtlety or hidden sophistication, built around choppy off-beat guitars, pounding (albeit highly varied and controlled) drums and easy-to-sing-along-with choruses. Even as the newer identity of the String Project emerges from highly intellectual classical-contemporary-crossover territory, the focus is generally the slightly cerebral field of trip-hop and downtempo bass music.

As a result (and also because of established status or otherwise of members, prestige of gigs / venues, preferred stage costumes, etc.), there is a particular kind of sweaty I only associate with Filthy Spectacula gigs – heaving pub rooms with the four of us and the seemingly huge mob of crowd bouncing around like ping-pong balls in the sports room of a cruise liner caught in a tropical storm. My subconscious says String Project gigs involve much less dancing and yelling, little less work on my part to liven up a crowd but producing appreciative applause and nodding along rather than I-look-like-an-idiot-and-I-don’t-care boogieing.

And yet the last few String Project gigs have given this the lie. The most recent one was rammed and featured some highly energetic dancing and the sort of lairily enthusiastic yelling from the crowd I associate with well-liked rock-n-roll. Admittedly, this particular crowd had been at a mini-festival for anything up to 9 hours; it was late on a Saturday night; they were mostly well liquored up; and having had a day of mostly fairly serious indie they were in the mood for some beats they could dance to, and the reggae-funk-trip-hop underpinning of most of our current live set suits that even it’s generally slightly more chilled and grooving than ‘Can you Cossack dance? If you can’t, jump up and down!’ (normal instructions before Filthy set closer). They had also showed similar, though less unbounded, enthusiasm for the previous warm-up set (me and a guitarist doing unpretentious ceilidh tune sets with a couple of trad jazz standards slung in for variety – hardly wall-shaking however briskly played and however much personality I manage to project on the rare occasions I’m left with a frontman slot!) and we had deliberately done a quick changeover. By the end of the double duty for me, I had attained that shirt-soaked-through level of hard work usually only found at Spectacula gigs.

So does the atmosphere make the set? Are there in fact hardly any party bands, just bands that get slots at party gigs? We’ve all seen punk / metal / generally rabble-rousing acts working really hard to the wrong crowd and getting no response – indeed, I’ve done it with the Filthy Spectacula, playing to an audience of sofa-bound hipsters on Brick Lane. But surely it takes some degree of suitability to the crowd to get a gut response, however well prepped they are (and pace the handful of people already trying to get their groove on to our version of Handel’s Arrival of the Queen Sheba before the beatbox kicks in halfway through … )?

As usual, both-and, compromise, life is messy and reality doesn’t come in binary pairs. BUT, it’s an interesting point that anything up to about half of how much a band get the crowd going might be down to who the crowd are and how they’re feeling to start with. If judging your own success, choose your venues, events and support acts carefully …

When is no publicity good publicity?

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Well, how about when the publicity you had was negative?

I’ve just pulled my Youtube video showreel from my website, and will shortly go and pull it from Youtube (or perhaps make it private if I can work out how). This follows upon it managing to lose me a gig which I was previously lined up to do, much to my annoyance and £150 to my financial detriment.

I wouldn’t generally advise anyone to market themselves as a musician or musical act without video. It’s expected for function / wedding and cruise work, and indeed often not just of acts as a whole but of potential deps by those acts; arguably more essential than audio-only recordings now.

But, I can’t afford to get another one made, and I think I need to be rid of this one – that it has in fact become an albatross around my neck.

It might also seem a waste of one of my first investments in professional music as such, and (sophist-)arguably my single biggest expenditure on music. (My viola cost less, but the total purchase with bow and case was more)

However, the video is now over a year old. It dates from when I had not yet really plunged myself into paying music – and I now both realise how much higher standards of perfectionism and professionalism are required, especially in marketing given how much more crowded with sellers than buyers the marketplace is; and more straightforwardly have had thirteen months or so of very intense playing (compared to pretty much any other period of my life), which has inevitably helped at least repolish some of my performing, even if a lot of it has been focused on things other than technique and detail of delivery.

And if people are thinking ‘OK, get him’ and then changing their minds on the basis of the video, then it clearly has to go. But it is unfortunate that I really can’t afford a replacement – a replacement which would be likely to require an even bigger budget, to secure higher production values, more space for retakes and sound editing, etc., as well as more dedication on my part. It’s also something of a shame that I can’t readily afford some more audio recordings by a conventional route, seeing as the ones I have are themselves 9 months old, were recorded in a freezing cold church in December on borrowed instruments, and basically could almost certainly be improved on. But that I might be able to address through friends and favour exchanges. For the moment video has, to rewrite the Buggles, pushed me back into having to be a radio star.