London Viola Player, Violinist & Arranger For Hire

Martin Ash LTCL

This week I have spent one evening in the house.

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By the end of the weekend I will still have spent one evening in the house.

I will have spent two evenings performing, one rehearsing, one in a pub catching up with an old friend back in Oxford for the week, and pretty much all weekend making a music video.

While doing a more than half-time job and having to be entirely practically self-sufficient (no partner / parents (well I have them but 200 miles away / cleaner / etc. to take any of the domestic load).

I’ve also been watching my bank balance with ever greater alarm and checking nearly hourly to see if I’ve been paid for anything – the month’s wages are probably due today for my desk job, I’m also owed for two gigs (shortly to be three) and I really don’t want to dip into my savings again this month. Which hasn’t stopped me spending over a hundred quid investing in light string quartet arrangements (on the questionable assumption that by the time the direct debit pays off my credit card, there will be that much money in my current account). It had better pay for itself, but it won’t be doing so overnight.

Maybe this was the wrong Lent to give up coffee. Thank goodness I decided to let myself have tea. Do you think I could sublet my bed for short naps and weekend lie-ins?

Be prepared. Be flexible.

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A couple of years back I was live on BBC Oxford with my old band Ragdoll. The traffic news had just interjected and we were about to start our third and final live lounge song, but our main guitarist was still engaged in changing tunings, or guitars, or moving a mike stand – I can’t remember. I do remember leaning over to (BBC Arts Editor, when not hosting a Sunday morning local radio magazine show) Will Gompertz’ ear and hissing ‘Fill! Fill!’ – which fact he promptly reported on-mike, providing him with most of the seconds needed to cover us being ready to carry on!

So last night I was playing a pub St Patrick’s night in west London. I’d been subhired by a function band, themselves the main act on the bill after a duo using backing tracks and not one but two Irish dance schools. (Incidentally, I wasn’t able to pay much attention to the second of these as I was busy setting up, but the first was my first close-up live exposure to formal Irish dancing and the speed, athleticism and precision of it (emphasised for me by being audible as well as invisible, the shoes must have something like taps on heels and toes) was mind-boggling – all the more so for the disciplined imperturbability from the waist up). There may have been more before I got there, the place was certainly making a night of it.

My job was twofold: add fiddle to the relevant Irish or country-oriented numbers of the band’s set, and do a short solo set of tradi Irish folk. And the musical proceedings I would be involved in had been impeccably planned and prepared – set list in order with keys sent out, rehearsal in advance of all the things I was joining the band for, break between the two band sets fixed and agreed as the point I’d do my solo spot, ready to go.

Well, more or less. Slight inconveniences like a crackly speaker lead and a PA mixer without phantom power were readily enough overcome with a bit of extra time and some contingency on the hardware front. I think there was one point I plunged into an intro (on a traditional song I was supposed to introduce, not changing an arrangement!) without tap-in as the drummer had corpsed on the arrangement for that song, and one when I had to be grabbed back to play as I didn’t hear the band were skipping a song I wasn’t playing on!

So far most of the way through the first band set. Then without warning a roughly A1 size Irish flag behind the drummer’s right shoulder drops off between songs, bringing with it a windowledgeful of emptyish glasses onto the guitar amps and mixing desk.

Acting a model of calm, the frontwoman asks me to do some solo stuff and I break into some jigs. At the end of which the crowd are taking to me quite well but cleaning up glass and spillage, restoring the flag and getting everything in order is proceeding slowly – ‘two more I’d say mate’ according to the drummer. Carry on with the set, assisted by some completely impromptu bodhran, really feeling the heat in a rammed pub with fancy lighting by my feet and needing my fingers to move fast and accurately because there’s no one to cover and not much room for manoeuvre when you’re doing folk dance tunes solo. One reel set and a somewhat questionable voice & fiddle rendition of Sally Gardens later (the PA doesn’t seem to be doing my fiddle tone or my singing many favours other than in the volume stakes) and we seem to be ready to go back to script – just when the guitarist finds the amp he’s using with his electric isn’t producing any sound. On to a hornpipe set; the crowd are still applauding enthusiastically but even the keen dancers seem to be reaching the tail end of their endurance for high-speed straight down the line traditional fiddle tunes.

Luckily at that point (with two-thirds of my set used and me not very keen to use my intended closer of Danny Boy given how I felt about Sally Gardens) the amp decided to play ball and we were back to business as usual. Not surprisingly without the planned set break or the remaining two solo numbers up my sleeve, and I wasn’t complaining by that point!

The thing is, you can prepare all you like, but there will always be contingencies beyond your control when you’re playing live. And I can’t say often enough that the most characteristic identifying feature of music work is not that it’s freelance, or that it’s creative or artistic or not desk-based, but that it’s (apart from, to a limited extent, high-budget studio recording) real-time. You have to play then, and keep playing then, and cover if necessary, and recover afterwards.

It may be generally true, as my first girlfriend’s father used to say, that ‘perfect planning prevents p***-poor performance’. But for live music, it won’t prevent interrupted or rocky performance. As well as preparation, you need flexibility up your sleeve to pull something out of the bag when unplanned things happen anyway. Which is stressful, but part of what makes it fun, and secretly one of the things working musicians wouldn’t want to do without: the satisfaction of a happy audience even though extra obstacles were thrown in your way.

Timing

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Timing, they say, is everything. And contrary to popular belief, it’s not always as simple as being synchronous with something else. A few months back, I had the (to me rather frustrating) experience of playing in Mendelssohn’s Elijah under the baton of Adrian Partington, with members of the Philharmonia leading the string sections. My frustration derived from the fact that, for no obvious reason, the inner circle (metaphorically and literally) of conductor and principals played the recitative sections on a system where the strings would start or hit chords, particularly on the downbeat, not in time with the bounce of Partington’s conducting, but in reaction a half-breath after it, as if it had been a shouted order for the chord not an indication of where it should be.

I haven’t actually paid enough attention to their playing to vouch for the truth of this other example, but I’m assured that the distinctive bluesy lope of the Rolling Stones is produced in part by Charlie Watts not just taking the speed of songs from Keith Richard’s guitar introductions rather than the other way round – which he certainly does – but also by him playing slightly behind Richard’s beat, in a sort of reversal of the common jazz technique of playing ‘back on the beat’, where a soloist plays deliberately slightly (and generally consistently) behind the rhythm section’s pulse for lazy-sounding effect.

And then of course speed is another whole musical area. Classical music can experience bewildering variations in tempo, for various reasons: the metronome was only invented c. 1800, so anything written before that and a very great deal after has only descriptive indications of speed, no objective measures. Composers have often produced metronome markings that demonstrably do not confirm to their own conducting or performance of the same work, or have perhaps been suffering from a malfunctioning metronome. There is also a wide penumbra from essentially speed markings (Lento, literally ‘slowly’), through combined speed and mood descriptions (Lento doloroso), to some composers who mark their scores with moods alone (Agitato means agitated, unsurprisingly, but how fast does something have to be to sound agitated? discuss … ). Terms have changed meaning over the roughly 300 years of repertoire that most performers deal with (I’m not aware of most Renaissance composers giving any indication of speed whatever, though I’d be interested to be contradicted), sometimes passing across the grey speed-style area in the process. And then there is the question of which note value composers intend the speed indication to apply to (again, when no metronome marking is given): an Allegro moderato may sound very different to how I expected if I was wrong in assuming that the sheets of semiquavers meant it was Allegro moderato in crotchets not minims!

Even if you think you know what speed something should go, there may be a negotiation between that and what is practically possible. I suspect most cover bands play ‘Rock Around the Clock’ as fast as their lead guitarist can reliably get round the original solo, since it’s far too well-known to omit or significantly change with any face but also requires a demanding combination of speed and precision – you can’t just fluff most of it as it’s too strictly rhythmic. Conversely, the speed of at least three of the Richard Strauss Four Last Songs (in the orchestral version) is usually determined by how long the soprano soloist can make the phrases while maintaining tone and the sometimes massive volume required to rise over the orchestral scoring.

At this point, time for a twist: this post isn’t a theory lesson (or deconstruction) as such, but a sort of half-developed metaphor for musical endeavours.

The Filthy Spectacula have made a fairly striking success of being always ahead of ourselves – recording a pro demo within two months of forming, doing our first gig with only enough repertoire ready to fill the slot, having to learn four new songs in a few weeks in order to play our first headline slot (itself our second gig, which is pretty absurd), now shooting a music video after six months together. It’s worked well for us.

On the other hand, the String Project spent a lot of the first three years of their existence trying to run before they, then we, could walk. Which meant a lot of underprepared gigs where we didn’t have the repertoire mastered enough to play it right, never mind convey the inherent life of some often partly experimental writing to a non-specialist audience; recordings that were out of tune or took days to come out with one or two useable tracks (once they had been edited together out of many takes) and a lot of waste. Only I think within the last year or so has the group really managed to find the sweet spot that balances the creativity and vision of Ben Mowat, always its main driving force, with parts that fit and suit its players, events and audiences that correspond to its style, and repertoire that is accessible, coherent and yet distinctive to its listeners. It is this more than anything else that has finally driven a lift in how satisfying and successful our gig appearances have been, and has let a more collaborative group push upwards in ambition rather than getting stuck at a level of unrealisable aspiration.

Which doesn’t supply any easy answers to how to pace my new project, and by some way the one that is most ‘mine’ in terms of ownership but also responsibility – the Finezza String Quartet. I suspect there is some impatience on the part of some members, and friends of mine, and a part of me shares it: You’re ‘in the process of forming’ a string quartet? What are you doing? How long can it take for Pete’s sake? Why are you not gig-hunting and marketing like crazy?

The answer is to a large extent that I’m trying to get it right and avoid setbacks which can all too easily turn into rifts. I think we have a set of people that will work, and a good name, and we’re making progress on getting music together. Having looked at the market a fair bit though, I don’t want to start madly chasing gigs with just a name and the potential of learning enough music for a job. Getting decent work or establishing ongoing relationships will take the standard press pack – audio, live video, pro photos, blurb text, reasonably slick website, bespoke email address. Those will take a little longer, though I do want to put timetables on when we plan to do them. In the meantime, there seems to be a basically steady flow of agencies and clients, new, expanding and established, looking for acts, and I’m going to trust that it will be worth diving into that stream later but properly prepared rather than as soon as possible. Keep watching this space – I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Jekyll & Hyde

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It sounds like a parody of the superhero comic / film genre from the start:

By day, a desk-bound grammar Gestapo agent, silently eliminating superfluous commas and dangling participles. By night, a creative free spirit roaming over stages and genres from gypsy goth in Camden to Romantic in Warminster. The editorial fine-tooth comb and the irrepressible fiddler; a riddle from either side … but how long can he lead a double life?

And while I wouldn’t seriously use that kind of purple prose about myself, there’s some truth to it. Like the fact that I more or less literally do my desk job in daylight and the public, participative part of my music work after dark (emails and private practice are another matter and may easily start at 9am – surprisingly my housemates and neighbours have yet to complain). Or indeed the difference between steady fixed-hours work for predetermined pay and the constant insecurity of uncertain freelance income in a very fluid market.

There are times when the two do collide, even doing both part-time. (I’m not entirely sure what the part-time label means applied to the music to be honest; perhaps just that I only need to be half as worried about the amount of money it makes.) Today I was asked could I do a to-be-confirmed gig tomorrow daytime – paid, from my point of view pretty much an add-on to tomorrow evening’s gig. Not an opportunity my musical self is going to pass up cheerfully; but my desk self is obliged to book time off in advance, so I couldn’t commit to the gig without getting confirmation before the end of the working day.

The real question, though, is do they require different personalities? Is there a real Jekyll and Hyde duality going on as I flit between the two? Well, to some extent I hope so; the main reason for going into music was after all that my desk job requires a working personality that is significantly artificial for me and that I was finding it too much of a strain to maintain (or be subjugated to) full-time. There’s certainly a difference between the making utterly certain of things that’s usually pervasive in my desk job, where the core of the job description is really to overlook absolutely nothing; and the rat race of freelance paying music, where you have to throw your hat into every ring, not only claim but believe you would be totally right for anything you might at all believably be equipped to do, never pull out of something because you’re scared of messing it up or you’re underprepared or you’ve been hired 36 hours before the concert – and at the same time be a total sceptic in order to spot when you might be ripped off or exploited because you don’t have enough safety margin to fall for it often.

Even the points of overlap can be equivocal. Yes, working in a big corporate and being a successful freelancer both require getting on with people well; but the sort of people and relationships that drive offices with over a thousand people in them are generally rather different to the sort that drive sticky-floored indie music venues, web-based entertainment agencies and shoestring semi-professional classical concerts. I’m not sure whether some of my bandmates would be more startled by how I am around my day colleagues or vice versa sometimes …

And only some of this can be kept impersonal of course. I’ve done reasonably well at keeping my publishing career out of my personal (including personal online life); it would be probably impossible and certainly utterly stupid to try and do the same with my musical freelance activity. As illustrated by the fact I’m about to share this post on my personal Facebook wall. This, and contemporary social media, does mean that if I want anything to be useful commercially, it has to be of a nature to be safely put where my brother or the woman who ran my church group when I was a pre-teen (and is now in close contact with my mother) will quite likely find it. Or if it isn’t I have to either take the business loss or take the personal risk. Erm, I mean, that sentence should have been in a different tense … any such happening is purely hypothetical … and of course I would never engage in such … what guilty conscience? … me? …

Briefs

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My desk job alter vita involves quite a lot of hiring freelancers. This can open up a lot of amusing how the other side lives perspectives – usually slightly skewed because music performance just isn’t educational publishing.

A colleague has a cartoon pinned above her desk headed ‘the importance of good briefs’. Of course it shows a man rifling through an unbound manuscript dressed only in a pair of psychedelic technicolour Y-fronts. But in general editorial freelancers are given a lot of information before they’re hired, and then almost everything they could conceivably need (and usually erring on the side of caution) when they get started.

With music, it can be a matter of chasing up the client just to find out where and when you’re supposed to show up. I’ve turned up to sole rehearsals before now to discover I’m the only violist in an orchestral programme. Today’s rehearsal had two advantages over that: firstly, it was one of two (luckily this job is in Oxford, otherwise I’d probably have asked to skip one of them and save on travel); secondly, I had an email yesterday telling me I was the only viola. What I wasn’t told by that email was that we’re doing the reduced version of Karl Jenkins’ Mass for Peace with (counts on fingers) 11 instrumentalists – which might have been useful information.

You get used to travelling heavy rather than light. If I’ve got a non-classical job of any sort, I’ll usually take pickup, DI box and the relevant leads to plug one through the other into a PA system. If I think there’s any chance of me needing it, a music stand comes along too; and while I won’t bother for rehearsals, a tuner comes to gigs and both that and a metronome come to recordings. Plus layers as rehearsal and performance spaces can range from the icy to the tropical – sometimes in the course of one session if the soundproofing has been so comprehensive as to also prevent any circulation of air or loss of heat and you’re in there playing uptempo folky rock for three hours.

Classical clients unsurprisingly know what the repertoire will be well in advance. Bands and singer-songwriters may (though it’s not universal) change much more at the last minute; and are also quite liable to mean something unexpected by the items on the set list. By way of a worked example, go away and listen to a traditional version of the Irish song ‘Whiskey in the Jar’. Or, for the full effect, just look it up on an online database of sheet music to Irish etc. folk, you’ll find it. Envisage having learnt it this way. Then listen to the Thin Lizzy version. Envisage turning up to find the band you’re sitting in with (on fiddle) are covering that pretty closely. Reduced orchestrations and cuts may be classical occupational hazards, but Barber’s Adagio doesn’t change to that degree between performances.

(Function bands, and indeed basically all groups that intend to profit, keep their numbers as small as possible as a general rule. So in this case just one guitarist, and there’s only so much you can do with one guitar now Bert Jansch is dead. If you’re intrigued by the idea of those characteristic Thin Lizzy riffs being played with electric guitar and fiddle doing the parallel thirds, you’ll need to spend St Patrick’s night at the New Inn in Ealing with me a Razzberry Jam. ‘Cos I’m not sure I’ll get the chance to do that again!)

Freelance music: you may not have a clue what you’re doing, you may be reduced to miming in performance by having got completely lost, but as long as you’re working you’ll never be bored.

What are you selling?

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One of the things I’ve noticed in these months is that there isn’t actually much of a market for freelance musicians.

Yes, you read that right. The thing is, being a freelance player or singer implies someone else is going to organise a group of some kind – either a temporary one that will include you, or a longer-term one which you will temporarily be added to or cover for someone else in.

In harsh economic times (certainly for musicians of all stripes), margins are getting squeezed including among the middle(wo)men. Which produces a greater desire for musicians to organise themselves and just provide a ready-to-perform product, because they probably won’t charge extra for the time spent sending emails, organising rehearsals etc. which you’d have to pay an admin assistant to do otherwise.

The same factors (plus, on the classical side, some complications to do with orchestras tending to change from employers to co-ops) mean musicians are leaving their seats empty to be filled by deps less and less. Bluntly, they need the money and the reputation for commitment and reliability. And hiring extra hands is an extra overhead that is generally avoided if there’s any way (including more conservative repertoire choices) of getting round it.

So there’s not much work for unattached individuals. The jobbing musician struggles, quite genuinely, to find work.

The work goes instead to the prepackaged standalone acts. They might be soloists of course – guitarist/singers, background music pianists, singers/sax players/violinists/etc. who use backing tracks – but the point is that they provide a single point of booking musical services. And the more they can provide, the better, hence the increasing number of bands that will DJ between sets, acts that own their own PA so they only need a venue to provide power sockets, ceilidh bands that will also do generic party/function music after the called dancing wraps up, etc. etc.

Of course standalone acts are an investment. They have to be rehearsed and promoted; recordings (audio and video) made, photos taken, websites and business cards made, clients and client agencies contacted and impressed – there is a lot of paying in before the project is likely to pay out. And unless you do go down the solo artist route, you can’t really go anywhere without a varying number of other people on board.

This is somewhat daunting, and succeeded in keeping ideas about forming a money-making group (to alleviate the lack of freelance pay going) at a pie-in-the-sky level for – well, about seven months.

However … behind-the-scenes work on putting together a string quartet now seems to be paying off in taking real shape. There’s a lot to do (and it often makes me feel tired already!), but the potential benefits are big and there’s certainly no point wussing out now. Watch this space for when we have anything fit for public consumption!

On the record

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The money has gone out of recording, they tell us. Well, the numbers back it up: you want to make a profit, rely on getting punters at live gigs, not shifting singles.

Does that mean recording is less important as a musician? I think not. The reason it’s not profitable is because recording sounds and copying, sending and distributing recordings are open to more or less everyone (in the middle-class West) now, so they’re no longer highly chargeable activities. Rather like the ability to write legibly after near-universal literacy arrived at the end of the nineteenth century. This is not to degrade the ability and worth of pro recording engineers, producers etc. by the way – creating recordings that sound good, or ironically that even sound particularly like being at a live performance by the same performers, remains highly skilled and difficult but that’s a slightly separate point.

Recording being so accessible means it’s much more widely called for. Last Saturday I spent a few hours at David Allen‘s flat recording part of a film score. Yes, you read that right. It did involve an expensive stereo mic, a digital mixing desk and an alarmingly powerful computer, but we were able to use his living room for me to multitrack a good-natured pastiche of the Quintet of the Hot Club de France – me recording in succession a load of verses of rhythm guitar to pick among and overlay for that thick twin-rhythm sound, some basslines (digging out the acoustic bass guitar that I haven’t used in anger in months) and my best effort at fluid Stephane Grappelli violin lead and soloing. The finished article, edited, stitched together, mixed and mastered, will appear once it’s through post-production and you can see how you think I did! It’s not many years since a student-level director probably wouldn’t have used music in his film, or would have had to put up with seriously lo-fi recording unless he could afford a professional studio at hundreds of pounds a day.

And it goes further. I applied for a professional orchestra starting up in Yorkshire – which sounds crazy, but not if I only have to go there half a dozen times a year for initial rehearsals and concerts, and the finances start coming up as they’ve planned. But there isn’t exactly excess startup capital flying around, so they’re not trying to get everyone who’s interested to York or Leeds, hire space, get hours and hours of assessors’ time, and audition players as such. Instead, they’re assuming dicky sound quality won’t prevent them sorting the sheep from the goats, and asking for a home recording of such to such bars of this piece, parts conveniently free to download from Petrucci (the hard-up classical musician’s godsend, I can’t recommend it often enough).

There may not be albums out there with my name on any time (very) soon, but there is more and more keepable evidence of my (and everyone else’s) musical work building up all the time.

Far too many shades of temptation

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One unsurprising result of replacing roughly half of my previous wage with a newly-begun freelance career is a significant drop in overall income. Since I (and basically everyone in Oxford, repeatedly found to be the least affordable area in Britain) was living pretty close to the break-even point anyway, that inevitably means cuts to expenditure. So one of the slightly counterintuitive effects of becoming a professional musician is not that I won’t but that I can’t play for free – if I’m not paid, then the inevitable costs of travel, eating out or takeaway because I’m away for half a day and can only take one packed meal, a social drink while schmoozing fellow performers in hope of future gigs, become a set of luxury expenses that I don’t have the disposable income for.

There is a very fair point about not playing for free as a professional because it brings the market price down for everybody else; solidarity is necessary to make music remunerative and doing it really well requires too much time and effort to hold down a full-time day job simultaneously, so everyone playing as a hobby because they love it is not a serious option. There is also a point about not selling yourself individually short; that if you start off in the scene of unpaid music you may well get stuck there rather than finding it ever any easier to ‘graduate’ into properly paid work than it would have been at step one.

But there are nonetheless things that I would dearly love to play which don’t bring in money. Semi-staged Mozart opera in Devon; small-forces Bach St Matthew Passion on Good Friday; electric blues jamming and perhaps low-key gigging for fun. They all really do sound like fun; but if they only cover travel, or are profit-shares that mathematically can’t make me more than I’ll spend on being in them, then I’ll only be speeding up my movement towards being broke by doing them.

The temptations have to be resisted. Choosing paid music over unpaid is rarely difficult, but if I have to choose to stay in by myself when I could spend money going off and playing fun stuff – well, I knew what I was getting into.

Musical theory of relativity

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Organising musicians is often said to be like herding cats. I think the big difference is musicians are more likely to steal each other’s food.

But there’s a massive variability in how far in advance is deemed acceptable, necessary or alternatively worrying for organising music. Ben Mowat of the String Project is a little concerned we only have eight rehearsals to gear up for our very big gig on 24 April (get it in the diary now folks! The Cellar, Oxford); and last weekend The Filthy Spectacula (including me) were getting worried about not having any detailed plans from the director for a music video being shot four weeks later.

On the other hand, on Tuesday I answered an email about needing a viola for a (concert, not staged) performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. On Wednesday evening I was in a rehearsal, sight-reading basically the whole thing along with eight of the eventual 11 instrumentalists; last night (Friday) we performed it, feeling hard-worked and nervous but without any major problems.

Partly, this just says that if you have to pay for rehearsal space and people’s travel and/or time, and you’re not going to make much if any profit on the performances, then you cut all the expenses to the bone, including rehearsals, and count on good hired hands to work with the situation. But it’s also a little to do with a truth about classical and popular music that is the reverse of common myth.

Classical musicians are normally assumed to be super-prepared, having rehearsed daily for weeks and tied down every last nuance. And that can be true, but it’s usually closer to the amateur than the professional experience. (most) Professional classical musicians have some key advantages for fast preparation:

  • They don’t have to write their own music. They don’t even have to write their own parts to existing songs. The parts come pre-made.
  • They don’t have to memorise their parts, just know them well enough to play them fluently and with ensemble coherence – but with the notes in front of them. Think of the difference between a radio play (even broadcast live), where scripts are fine provided delivery is natural and rustling paper doesn’t get picked up by the mikes, and having to memorise the same script to, say, act it on stage.
  • Questionable advantage to some, but I think if you’re used to reading music you’re likely to sight-read much more quickly than you can learn parts by ear.

It’s the bands writing originals, or doing creative-ish covers, that have to spend time painstakingly jamming out arrangements, learning chord progressions from each other, workshopping ideas of sounds in the rehearsal room. Even covers bands can at least learn parts pretty much entire in isolation (meaning, at home with YouTube … ) and only need the rehearsal time to fit them together. But having done all of these to some extent, unless everything you do is a twelve-bar bash through, the apparently turn up and play rock-n-roll bands who don’t write anything down need most preparation; a bunch of strangers can viably show up, spend three hours rehearsing music they’ve never played and haven’t necessarily heard or seen before, and perform an evening of (relatively) very complex and ‘difficult’ classical music.

Many things are not what they seem in music. Including preparation.