London Viola Player, Violinist & Arranger For Hire

Martin Ash LTCL

Mammon

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There has been some moderately energetic debate going on in one of my bands recently about whether to make an album, largely on terms of how to afford to do so. On one side the argument largely runs ‘We should really have an album, it would do a lot for the album profile, if we do more recording we can do more music videos, plus we can sell it for real money, and surely we want to have a permanent artefact of what we already do as a band?’ I’m sat in the other corner (the remaining band members are trying to steer a middle path between these) going ‘I can’t afford to pay to make an album. All right, gig proceeds after expenses can go into an album kitty. Oh but in that case rehearsal room hire has to come out of the kitty because I can’t afford to pay that either if I’m only keeping gig expenses from gig fees. No, I don’t care if that means the kitty barely increases, keep pushing and I will quite (or at least stop showing up to rehearsals which is rather similar).’

It’s an unfortunately extreme example, but what it puts under the spotlight is a severe bind for my future planning.

My income and expenses have been bumping along at roughly equal for the last 4 months or so. From when I went part-time in my day job until about May, I was simply spending a lot more than I made. I’ve already hugely chopped down my charitable giving, started buying significantly cheaper food (farmer’s market to Co-op essentially, varied with Costcutter), practically given up getting takeaways, done what I can to reduce travel costs. If the numbers aren’t looking up noticeably at the end of this month (September), then the veg box will have to go in favour of less nice and probably less ethical but presumably cheaper supermarket fruit and veg. And I’m genuinely not sure when I last bought clothes, though I occasionally splurge on some music or (secondhand and very cheap) books.

In other words, my expenses can’t be cut that much further without moving into an absolute dump – I already live in a three-way house-share in one of the less fashionable, cultural and accessible parts of Oxford. Significantly further down the scale and I would start to get worried about neighbours / housemates stopping me practising, or sheer lack of practical space to work from home half the time.

At the same time, I seem to have hit a wall as regards pushing income up. Even if I didn’t see it as simply a step backwards, increasing my hours in my desk job would almost certainly push me back into proper mental illness, whereas at the moment I generally balance more or less, even with issues of tiredness, keeping ridiculous hours and perpetual uncertainty (though serious worry about ending up slowly bleeding off all my savings is making it noticeably more difficult to maintain that balance). And there doesn’t seem to be anything new opening up in the music sphere. Freelance seems flat, where I’d hoped it might pick up in the autumn; neither band is making any money for its members, barely paying their ways on internal expenses; I’ve yet to get any more cash from hoped-for ongoing contacts and return invitations. The last effort at putting together a group to hit the function / wedding / agency scene was not only personally draining and depressing, I put a lot of money into a black hole. I can’t do that again and I don’t think I’ve hit a new magic bullet to avoid it on another attempt.

I’m not that convinced that investment in some radical new asset would help. But it certainly is annoying that I don’t (until the next fixed-term bond matures – if I want to seriously start spending my savings – by which I mean my inheritance – if if if – ) have the means to consider something like a performance qualification, a new instrument or some swanky additional promo material. I more or less have to keep doing what I’ve been doing for a year and hope something external changes, which is less than logical in total honesty.

So the album might have to wait. And the chateau in France, the viola da gamba, the getting the violin serviced for the first time in 15 years and the new pair of shoes.

Scattered thoughts on improvisation

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A little while back I depped almost unrehearsed with a Celtic rock band doing largely original songs and having been hired at about 24 hours’ notice. When I came off stage, their regular fiddle player (out of action with a collarbone broken in three places), assessed my performance with the phrase ‘That was good jazz.’

It wasn’t jazz of course, but it had been largely a set of me improvising on the fly from knowing what key the songs were supposedly in (written, at my request, on my set list!), and listening hard. Improvisation, particularly in a lead-melodic type fashion, is a necessary skill for some of what I do, yet also one that is harder to consciously improve, or to be sure I am actually improving at, than, say, sight-reading, high notes or special technique effects.

It’s absolutely true, and I often repeat it, that improvisation requires practice; even requires it more than playing the same thing each time, whether written or memorised. After all, for the latter you only have to play what your memory recalls or is written down in front of you; to improvise you have to about as much brainwork as that, in the shape of performing your improvisation, while simultaneously coming up with the notes themselves. If it’s harder, you need to do it more to get equally good at it.

However, few contexts require, or allow, absolutely free improvisation. In fact (strengthening the tie to jazz) most Western improvisation except for the work of the top rank of church and cathedral organists takes place over a more or less rhythmically and harmonically prefixed accompaniment – ‘changes’ in jazz, or chords and/or riffs usually carried over from another section when improvising in blues / rock / country / folk-rock / soul / etc. tracks. This creates problems for practising in the usual sense of the word – something that sounds great by itself may rely on holding a chord for an extra bar, or speeding up, or disregarding the harmony altogether, or many other possibilities that I certainly wouldn’t notice myself doing if I was engaged in getting to grips with soloing on a particular song at the same time. It then becomes effectively necessary to rehearse improvising for a particular setting (ie have the accompaniment with you, ready to shout if you’ve gone astray! or more seriously so you can hear when you’ve parted ways), rather than trying to practise it alone in the way most technical problems are usually solved. The only plausible way round this would seem to be to make or get yourself some kind of backing track that can be used to play over without convening lots of rehearsals.

Finally, there is the question of how to consolidate or expand one’s improvising ‘toolkit’. Playing simply notes from the chords will rather rapidly lead to exhausting the useful possibilities of arpeggios; embroidering the melody can just as quickly get stale unless the variations are pushed further and further, in which case it is necessary to know where they can be pushed without becoming (whatever this may mean in context!) ‘wrong’ rather than interesting.

Modern jazz has developed whole (usually contradictory) systems of theorising improvisation and alteration: modes (one per piece where applicable, or one per chord in almost anything!), chord substitutions and standard additional notes to given chords, voice leading, etc. Textbooks are available on these, and I believe most really well-known jazz players do indeed study, learn and apply them. However, there is a disadvantage that a great deal of bebop and its successors into avant gardes (much less so the modal / cool / Latin strands) sounds dissonant and unpleasant to unaccustomed audiences, and would be spectacularly jarring if spliced into a rock or blues song or an acoustic guitar interpretation of an Irish ballad. In a real sense, most non-jazz improvisation in my current musical world requires something less clever than Coltrane, Bird or Eric Dolphy – at least the vast majority of the time.

There is also, of course, a whole industry in and beyond jazz of painstakingly transcribing recorded solos note for note, so that they can be played verbatim by covers acts and/or adoring bedroom amateurs, or used for analysis and imitation by other soloists. (My impression is the former is largely the preserve of rock guitarists, and the latter a key process for the serious jazz student.) Ignoring playing someone else’s solo which is clearly not improvisation, the initial problem with modelling improvisation on someone else seems to me to be, how do you marshal that much information in real time? In the same way that it requires a lot of as it were processor power to allocate a mode to the chords being read or remembered and then use that as a basis for melodic construction, or to decide in advance what alterations will be made to the basic chords so as to use substituted ones, so too it seems a lot to ask to recall ‘ooh, a ii-V-I cadence coming up; maestro X used this figure for ii-V-I progressions in some places; in this key it would be this:’ and play it, without either dropping out for the previous few bars to get the idea together, or not reaching the relevant point till well after the rhythm section had passed through it. It is presumably achievable, but certainly requires a dedication of time and effort not possible to me while requiring a part-time desk job to stay financially afloat and having to keep several other (mostly more immediately lucrative) musical/technical balls in the air at the same time.

Perhaps this comes down to the truth that complex improvisation is difficult. For the generalist winging a lot of things like myself, there are few or no shortcuts to good work; and without shortcuts it is too difficult to fit into the time and energy available. In that sense it joins things like recital-standard technique, or classical composition, as potentially useful but unattainable partly for exactly the reason that I am already playing for a living. There’s a reason most people achieve a professional standard of such things while students; but I won’t be going off as a mature conservatoire student in any immediately foreseeable future.

Why are there so few women conductors?

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One of the televised Proms on my to-watch list (which grows longer a lot quicker than I manage to watch any of it) is various chunks of modernism conducted by one Susanna Malkki (I accept no blame if that’s misspelt). It’s largely there because the conductor is a woman and that’s so unusual in professional classical music.

Back in 2003, I was playing with the then Merseyside Youth Orchestra (now the rather verbose Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Youth Orchestra). A new conductor was being recruited, and a shortlist of 5 or 6 candidates were invited to take chunks of a rehearsal, with the orchestra’s feedback being considered. One of them was a woman. She certainly wasn’t the worst in the field – no positive-discrimination token presence – but she wasn’t appointed and as I recall that didn’t surprise us.

Overall, professional orchestras are getting quite even on gender balance, despite the exclusive old-fashioned image and the long history of utter sexism (Britain’s first female professional orchestral musician, a viola player, was hired around the first world war, giving less than a hundred years of mixed orchestral history). That’s my unscientific impression anyway. Women are still rare, as far as my TV and occasional concert watching suggests, in the heavy brass and percussion; but they make up around half or even slightly more of woodwinds and strings and are pretty well spread across instruments there. I have the impression that the women players tend to be younger on average than the men, and that the conservatoires have a real female gender skew (like most quite academic sectors of UK education), which suggests that those proportions may increase and cause female predominance in time.

Still not that many female star soloists though, except singers where there isn’t direct male competition (no castrati any more thank God). A fairly decent number of violinists and cellists, the odd pianist but definitely in a minority. And I really think more active respected female composers than conductors now, which is striking given how very few well-known composers there are from before about 1900 (er, Hildegard von Bingen … Clara Schumann maybe … erm?).

I’m very reluctant to enter into possible reasons for this, not least because it’s so very difficult to avoid making sweeping gender generalisations of character (of precisely the kind that, as a man, I bitterly resent!). But the fact is observable, and made more odd by the contrast with other musical roles and indeed to some extent with the good-amateur sector, especially choral conductors. Is it that there is a glass ceiling on female conductors; or as a career path, is it rather that the women are choosing to climb other ladders?

Either way it would be very hard to deny that music is the poorer for the vast majority of its professional musical directors being drawn from just under half the population (regardless of other under-represented groups).

A slightly contained rant

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I nearly posted this as my Facebook status, then decided that it wasn’t a good idea. I don’t think it’s actually about being diabetic; I think it’s more about the mass-hysteria way in which a particular issue can get prioritised as by far the most appalling due to media prompting and a certain critical mass response, whether it’s the horror of cancer, hunger in Africa, or paedophilia (which, in one poll a few years back, more Britons wanted the death penalty for than murder. Definitely a worse indictment of humanity than cancer sufferer memes). Anyway, for the record and as some kind of compromise rather than deleting it altogether, here’s what I haven’t posted onto wider-distribution social media because it would only lead to more muck-slinging that can’t help anyone:

I am fed up of memes along the lines of ‘if you don’t repost this random photo of a person having lost all their hair to chemotherapy, you’re a selfish pig with no soul’. (a) I just don’t repost memes. Not part of what I can be bothered to use social media for. (b) they usually contain grotesque language errors, besides being self-righteous and offensive. (c) people get over cancer. Obviously not all people, but some do. I have a disease (type 1 diabetes) which I will never get over and which medical science has not yet found out how to cure or even put into remission – the outcomes are either I manage it well enough that something else kills me before the complications do (and I’m of the first generation at all likely to live out a fairly normal lifespan with the condition), or, well, the other way round (it can get me lots of ways, and potentially take my sight / kidneys / feet / various other body parts and functions on the way). Yet I have never encountered a fundraising campaign, ad series, sponsored event, charity (though I think there is one) or sickening attempted-guilt-trip-inducing meme aimed at supporting type 1 diabetics. And, with obviously the exception of this status massively falling off the wagon, you don’t catch me bitchin’ much. Even if I did, I’d rather you did something concrete like donated some money to medical research than changed your f’ing Facebook status for 24 hours.

in/coherent

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The hired-hand conditions of most starting-out professional musicians, especially those not starting from the fairly defining set of contacts, techniques and expectations of mainstream conservatoire training, tend to produce a highly fragmented musical picture. For me certainly it has so far been four gigs one week, none the next; save £400 in June only to outspend my earnings by £500 in July; today Haydn, tomorrow neo-soul, next week steampunk and wedding reception Irish rock.

This tends to go smack in the face against all the (now very) late-Romantic ideas about creativity, artistry, originality, self-expression etc. that are still the bedrock of most Western thought about people that make music, write, draw, and so on. I’m determined to be pragmatic and adaptable about my paying music – which is part of why I prefer the label ‘craft’ to ‘art’ for what I do. But I’ve written about that at length in other posts and wanted to not repeat myself too much in this one.

This blog contains musings almost as scattered as my gigs and clients. Little individually more or less coherent disquisitions on orchestral performance practice, or playing style, or the visual aspects of musical performance, and so on and on and on. Is there a connecting worldview or value-set? And is there a connecting thread to how I play music, or am I as pure a musical chameleon as ability and knowledge will allow?

The cheat answer on the musical front at least is to argue that everything I do becomes coherent because I do it. But I don’t think that answer means anything in real terms.

Perhaps, in a paradox that typically appeals to me, the unifying thread is a desire to avoid ‘I want to play this’ and ‘I want to do it this way’ ‘because I like it’. The vast majority of what I do for money involves a deliberate and willing adoption of the tastes and expectations of the context. You want gloopy, unaccented, vibrato-laden Romantic orchestral string playing? You shall have it. Jigs and reels at such speed that tone and most aspects of technique have to be sacrificed to sheer tempo? Right you are. You’d rather I played without anything written in front of me even if it means questionably accurate renditions, or bounced around the stage like a first-generation punk even though I slip out of tune? Monsieur has excellent taste, sans doute.

I wouldn’t say I carry this to its logical extreme. I will tend to go very easy on vibrato playing Haydn, regardless of whether any gestures to period performance are being made by the rest of the orchestra. If I’m asked to write a backing string arrangement (rather than transcribe existing material to fit the real instruments available), I’m likely to try and make more use of technical, timbral and textural variety, and indeed of straightforward rhythm, melody and non-repetition, than the exemplars the client was probably thinking of because to my mind stereotypical jazz and pop string section writing is just lazy and limited.

So am I the musician that does nothing for myself? Well, maybe nearly. But even that won’t cover the full picture. It doesn’t make any real sense of my actively seeking out unusual style-instrument combinations, like blues violin or jazz viola, where there isn’t a model or much in the way of expectations to match. Nor does it explain what I write my parts out of with The Filthy Spectacula – where there is a deliberate mishmash of genres, the music is all new, and pretty much none of the influences we draw on at a distance feature strong precedent for fiddle as lead instrument. I mean, at least you can say roughly what ska-punk bass might sound like, or a rockabilly drum beat, or dark cabaret vocals even. Anyone got any ideas of what gothic violin playing typically constitutes? Yet this is the area where perhaps my playing / writing / improvising are most appreciated.

Contradiction remains the unifying feature. Quelle surprise.

Nervous tension

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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?

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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

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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

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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

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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 …